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Posts Tagged ‘Microeconomics’

Yahoo’s Self-Inflicted Winner’s Curse

Posted in Auctions, Internet, Microeconomics, Technology, tagged , , on April 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Over at Managerial Econ, Luke Froeb highlights a nice example of the winner’s curse. Like Google, Yahoo uses automated auctions to sell ads. One wrinkle is that some advertisers prefer to pay for impressions, some prefer to pay for clicks, and some prefer to pay only for resulting sales. Yahoo thus needs some mechanism to [...]

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Taxi Medallions in DC: Who Would Win and Lose?

Posted in Microeconomics, Regulation, tagged , , on April 10, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Today’s lesson in political economy: the looming battle over Washington’s cab market. Three members of DC’s City Council (Marion Barry, Harry Thomas, Jr., and Michael Brown) want to require every taxi to have a medallion. The number of medallions would be much smaller than the number of cabs on the streets today. As I noted [...]

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The Rising Risk of Antibiotic Resistance

Posted in Microeconomics, Regulation, Technology, tagged , , on April 3, 2011 | 9 Comments »

Scary theme of the week? Rising antibiotic resistance. Megan McArdle highlighted this challenge in her presentation at the Kauffman bloggers event on Friday; if you have a moment, check out her chart at the 2:00 mark, showing that resistance to new antibiotics has been developing faster and faster. You’ll hear more about resistance later in [...]

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Thanksgiving Reading

Posted in Business, Microeconomics, Nature, Politics, Technology, tagged , , , , on November 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

So many fascinating economic issues, so little time to blog. Here are some of the fun items that I would have discussed in recent days if I had infinite time: How OpenTable uses its market power. Over at Incanto, Mark Pastore describes how OpenTable uses its dominant position in online restaurant reservations to get as much [...]

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Economics in Action: Is Groupon Worth It?

Posted in Microeconomics, tagged , on November 23, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Over at the New York Times You’re the Boss blog, Jay Goltz provides a great example of economic reasoning (ht: Jack B). His topic: how should small businesses think about the costs and benefits of participating in daily coupon sites like Groupon? Participants can see big spikes in traffic, at the expense of slashed margins. Is [...]

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DC’s New Mayor Should Say No to Taxi Medallions

Posted in Microeconomics, Regulation, tagged , , on November 9, 2010 | 18 Comments »

I love taxi medallions. As an example for my microeconomics students, not as policy. Just last week, I used New York City’s medallion system to show how an entry barrier — the requirement that each yellow taxi have one of a limited number of medallions — could create profits in an otherwise viciously competitive industry. [...]

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Behold the Power of Cheese

Posted in Microeconomics, tagged , on November 7, 2010 | 4 Comments »

American cheese policy is full of contradictions. (If it were full of holes, it would be Swiss cheese policy.) What, you didn’t know America has a cheese policy? Well, we do, as part of our larger dairy policy. And over the years the dairy policy’s failures have led to caves full of uneaten cheese, subsidized [...]

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Gender Arbitrage by Multinationals

Posted in Microeconomics, tagged , on October 26, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Economists often argue that market competition can limit some of the economic inequities from discrimination (this idea goes back at least to Gary Becker’s 1957 treatise The Economics of Discrimination). If some businesses refuse to hire well-qualified women or minorities, for example, that creates an opportunity for other businesses to hire those workers at lower [...]

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It’s Back-to-School Season, Time to Lay Your Bets

Posted in Behavioral Economics, Finance, Microeconomics, tagged , , , , on August 10, 2010 | 1 Comment »

According to an article over at the Huffington Post (ht Natalie), students at 36 colleges will have a new option when they start classes this fall. Thanks to an outfit named Ultrinsic, students can now bet on whether they will get good grades. Students put up money at the start of the semester and then [...]

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The Chevy Volt Premium

Posted in Microeconomics, tagged , , , , on August 5, 2010 | 4 Comments »

The other day I noted that Amazon has been tussling with book publishers over the pricing of electronic books. Amazon would prefer a wholesale pricing model, in which it sets retail prices, rather than an agency pricing model, in which the publishers set the prices. One reason that Amazon would prefer the wholesale model is because it [...]

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