Tag Archives: Economics

price discrimination: n. the action of selling the same product at different prices to different buyers in order to maximize profits. This is, of course, the definition of price discrimination that I give to my classes. In practice, however, this notion of “same product” isn’t quite as simple as us instructors would have you believe. (Is anything ever, really?) We know that early-bird discounts at restaurants are generally considered price discrimination, as are higher prices for airline...

What makes economics a science? Well, if we are to believe most mainstream economists, models are what make economics a science. In a recent Journal of Economic Literature (1/2017) review of Dani Rodrik’s Economics Rules, renowned game theorist Ariel Rubinstein discusses Rodrik’s justifications for the view that “models make economics a science.” Although Rubinstein has some doubts about those justifications — models are not indispensable for telling good...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I’m now officially fighting a war against bad climate change logic in all forms.

One of the main topics in organizational economics (and economics in general I suppose) is the principal-agent problem- i.e. the misalignment of incentives between one party and another party enlisted to do the first party’s bidding. For example, a small-business owner hires an employee to run things and maximize profit for the owner, but a self-interested employee who is paid a fixed salary would likely rather check Facebook then do whatever it is that would be in the owner’s best interest....

La force de l’autorité scientifique, qui s’exerce sur le mouvement social et jusqu’au fond des consciences des travailleurs, est très grande. Elle produit une forme de démoralisation. Et une des raisons de sa force, c’est qu’elle est détenue par des gens qui ont tous l’air d’accord entre eux — le consensus est en général un signe de vérité. C’est aussi qu’elle repose sur les instruments apparemment les plus puissants dont dispose aujourd’hui la pensée, en particulier les...

On Fridays, we examine a research paper that uses (or fails to use) a clever method to perform causal inference, i.e. to tease out cause and effect. Economists Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu have a new paper published in the American Economic Review (also available in working paper form here) that shows that the existence of Fox News has a (statistically) significant impact on Republican vote share. Here’s the abstract:We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for...

The ‘patriotic bias’ of Ricardo’s trade theory Ricardo ging in seinem Modell des komparativen Vorteils von einem „patriotischen Bias“ aus: Er nahm an, dass weder In-vestments noch Arbeitskräfte international sonderlich mobil sind, und führt sein Argument des komparativen Vorteils für den freien Handel der Erzeugnisse unterschiedlicher Nationen bzw. Produktionsstandorte. Die heutige Globalisierung geht freilich über einen freien Güterhandel zwischen...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Results of a long-awaited and somewhat controversial evaluation of a public-private partnership to manage schools in Liberia were released yesterday by IPA and The Center for Global Development: With their education system in pretty bad shape, the Liberian government piloted the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, which contracted out day-to-day management of some government schools to a mix of operators, non-profit...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Results of a long-awaited and somewhat controversial evaluation of a public-private partnership to manage schools in Liberia were released yesterday by IPA and The Center for Global Development: With their education system in pretty bad shape, the Liberian government piloted the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, which contracted out day-to-day management of some government schools to a mix of operators,...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Results of a long-awaited and somewhat controversial evaluation of a public-private partnership to manage schools in Liberia were released yesterday by IPA and The Center for Global Development: With their education system in pretty bad shape, the Liberian government piloted the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, which contracted out day-to-day management of some government schools to a mix of operators, non-profit...