Firms and markets
Readings
- Chapters 7 and 12 in Naked Economics1
- Introduction and 7.1-7.12 in Economy, Society, and Public Policy2
- Play at least 15 minutes of “Universal Paperclips”3
- Michael Eisen, “Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies,” April 22, 2011
- Freakonomics Radio, “Why Uber Is an Economist’s Dream,” September 7, 2016
- Steve Sexton, “The Inefficiency of Local Food”, Freakonomics Blog, November 14, 2011
Other useful resources
These two sessions have a bunch of helpful guides in the resources section:
You should definitely check those guides out and follow along with the examples there.
These topics are covered in pretty much every introductory economics class in the world, which means the internet is full of examples of how to do the math involved. I’ve included lists of helpful videos at the top of each of these guides.
Slides
Download the slides from today’s class.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
- Introduction
- Supply and demand
- Demand and WTP
- Supply and WTA
- Elasticities of demand
- Scale, location, networks, and time
- Surplus, taxes, incidence, and DWL
- Changes in supply and demand
- Escaping the price taking world
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:
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Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). ↩︎
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The CORE Team, Economy, Society, and Public Policy, 2019, https://www.core-econ.org/espp/. ↩︎
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WARNING: This game can take over your life for the next day or so, which can be really fun and rewarding, but also it can seriously for real consume every waking moment for a few hours. This is your official warning. ↩︎