My son visited the Walt Disney World complex in Florida and pointed out the methods used to spread demand temporally. Coupons for 30 percent discounts on restaurant food purchased before noon or between 3PM and 4:30PM are available. Merchandise coupons for 20 percent discounts are given for use between 9AM and noon. Both coupons are offered to shift demand rightward at non-peak times.
How do you create the best master’s men’s swim team when the rules say that team members’ ages must sum to at least 200 years?
A student described her summer job at an arcade. In the “crane” game you win prizes by manipulating a claw to grab stuffed animals or basketballs, but the arcade owner can and does manipulate the odds of winning.
A student writes that she had a problem: An armadillo died in her family’s front yard, and its odor was attracting vultures.
New technologies give rise to other new technologies and complementary goods. I love my iPhone and, living in a warm climate, I always have fingers warm enough to operate the heat-sensitive letters on its screen. But in a cold climate, I would have the same problem others have – I would have to choose between being able to operate the iPhone and having warm fingers.
It’s final exam time, and my office is packed with a few of the 520 students in my bigger class. Although I’m pleased by their interest, I ask why they’re spending so much time on my course. The answer is that it’s the only final exam they have.
My Michigan-dwelling grandson will be 15 soon and will start learning to drive. He can’t get a full license until he’s 17, though, as the state wants to limit times and amounts of teen driving, presumably for safety reasons. That’s sensible – teen drivers are more likely to get into accidents. Despite this, the state prevents insurance companies from requiring people to purchase additional coverage for the teenager, even though between ages 16 and 17 the boy will be driving on his own.
I spent three nights recently in the guest house at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Very pleasant – and it was priced at $20/night (obviously heavily subsidized). In addition, however, there was a one-time $16 charge for cleaning at the end of my stay.
Do ATMs in Japan price discriminate on evenings and weekends? Or are you paying extra to ensure that there’s cash in the machine?
The City of Austin sells valet parking companies the right to use a parking space for $250 per year. Is that the right price? I doubt it.
The Economist explains how discrimination in the labor market can be reduced by competition in product markets. As in the U.S., Korean women obtain at least the same education as men; but their rates of labor-force participation are much further below those of men than is true in the U.S., and that’s even true for highly educated women. This provides room for companies to hire equally or more qualified women at the same or even lower wages than men.
I told my wife that I’m happy when I run my best possible, which I did (25:58) in Sunday’s Komen Run for the Cure 5KM race in Austin. She said that I should also be very happy that I took first place out of eight old guys in my age category (65-69).
Very applied personnel economics. During an upcoming stay in Florida with the extended family, all six adults want to go out to a fancy dinner, leaving the six kids alone (since their parents say the older ones – boy, 14; boy, 13; girl, 12; girl, 11 – can care for the little boys, ages 7 and 4). The older ones have had a lot of successful babysitting experience, and their parents say they typically get paid. But what payment mechanism is both efficient (will induce careful babysitting) and equitable?
A recent Buffalo News article discusses how the airlines are lobbying to rescind a new provision requiring commercial pilots to obtain 1,500 hours of flight training before they are certified (a Congressional response to last year’s fatal crash in Buffalo). The companies believe that this will cause pilots’ wages to rise (to pay for the increased training costs the pilots must incur), causing average total costs to increase, increasing industry prices and reducing output and profits.
The Texas A&M University system has embarked on a new accountability program. For every department – indeed, for every professor – revenue generated and cost incurred are calculated; and profit – the difference – is reported. Each professor is presumably supposed to have a marginal revenue product above his/her compensation.
Genesis 20:1-18 tells of Abraham visiting Avimelech and offering him Sarah (who, so Abraham tells Avimelech, is his sister, when she is also his wife).
All classes were canceled at the University of Texas one recent Tuesday because of a shooting at the main library. I already had a haircut appointment scheduled for 4 p.m. and suddenly had a lot of free time before then. I called the hairdresser and asked to come by at 2. She was free then. This gave me a preferable work schedule; and, as I had been her last appointment, she got off work early.
We “Greedy Geezers” will not be getting an increase in our monthly Social Security benefit payments in January, because the CPI is still below what it was in 2008.
What is a public good? An article today describes a house fire in Tennessee, where the firefighters refused to extinguish the fire because the owners hadn’t paid the annual voluntary fee for fire protection.
A recent article from the Chicago Tribune reported “an enormous surplus of LCD panels that has accumulated over the first nine months of the year.” This surplus arose partly because prices of flat-screen TVs had not fallen throughout much of the year-and the quantity demanded had accordingly been constant.
This year, we emailed an electronic letter reporting on our family events and offering best wishes to all the friends and relations to whom in the past we had snail-mailed Jewish New Year greeting cards. We felt guilty about switching away from the time-intensive activity of buying, signing and addressing snail-mail cards, and worried that the email would signal others that we viewed our time as too valuable to spend on a card. We don’t.
When I asked my students for examples of diminishing marginal utility, one wiseguy freshman stated, “Time with my girlfriends after a relationship of five months-I drop them after that.” (I should have told him that it’s hard to distinguish quits from layoffs, but I wasn’t fast enough on my feet!)
The College of Liberal Arts at UT is offering its first ever “buyout.” If a faculty member retires at the end of this semester, s/he receives two years of pay as a lump sum. To be eligible, the sum of age plus years at UT must be at least 93. Of the 88 eligibles, I’m told that over 40 are taking the buyout.
I asked my Turkish teaching assistant, a first-year Ph.D. student, what he’s doing about compulsory military service. To simplify, he is only liable for six months of service as a university graduate, instead of the usual one year; and if he stays here for three years or more, he can further delay service.
The determinants of one’s demand for a product are covered in every introductory economics course. Independent of prices, my income and my general preferences, I also consider the cuteness of the product’s name.
Every year, I teach the production possibility frontier in terms of the two outputs that students can produce-fun and learning. To introduce technical progress, I ask for examples, first sector-specific progress, then general improvements in technology.
We’ve had some old unwanted gold jewelry lying around for a long time. With gold at $1,237 per ounce, we figured it was time to sell it. We are a living movement up the supply curve of gold.
My son is renting a car in December. He’ll drive it for two days in Orlando, then he’ll drive to South Florida for an eight-day stay. With the drop-off charge, the price is $900. But if he drops the car off in South Florida when he arrives and rents a new one from the same company, the total price is only $500. He values his time spent dropping off the car at less than $400, so he’ll do it.
There are innumerable great examples of goods in related markets. And of complements and substitutes. (One of my favorites is the local store that sold rock music and condoms, clearly complements.) It’s harder to cook up neat examples of goods markets that are impinged upon by labor-market changes.
The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson presents information on disability payments to injured World War I veterans: 16 shillings per week (80 pence to those unfamiliar with older British money) for the loss of a right arm, 15 shillings for the loss of a left arm. Since about 90 percent of people are right-handed, this is more equitable than the reverse. But why not equality?
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