Economics 100B 
Intermediate Economic Theory
Welcome to the Economics 100B Website. Here you will find the course
syllabus,
a schedule of lessons, homework and examinations, and some bits of
advice.
Students in this class will be expected to check this site
regularly.
We will routinely use this site for posting announcements and answering
questions.
Office: North Hall 2052
Office Hours: Thursday, 3-4:30
and by appointment.
Email: tedb@econ.ucsb.edu |
Course Introduction
Click
Here to Learn the Ground Rules for Econ 100B
Click
here to sign up for Aplia Homework Required! Homework scores
count toward your grade. Each week's homework is due Sunday
night. Starting this week. See Ground Rules
discussion
for more about this.
Click here to find out about Classroom
Clicker Required! Regular in-class
questions also count toward your grade. See Ground
Rules discussion
Course Schedule
Click
Here to See the Course Schedule
Check here for Announcements
April 30 Quizzes have now been graded. To find your
score, click on Calvin below.
May 2.. Click here to find questions
about the results from the IPOD survey and an Excel file with
these results.
At this site you will also find results from a similar survey conducted
in an Econ 1 class.
May 17. Click here to see the
results of our in class oligopoly experiment. In each case,
the inverse demand curve has equation P=12-Q1-Q2
May 18. Here is a news story on what can happen to
colluders. An
article that provides more information about the
Christies-Sotheby collusion case. I recommend that you read
the news story and at least the first five pages of the article.
May 18. When you turn in correct answers to your homework, I will
assume that you know how to do this homework and you can expect me to
call on you to discuss it in an intelligent way in class.
There is nothing wrong with getting help with your homework, but
turning in homework that you don't know how to do is cheating and is
unfair to your classmates who do their own homework.
I will continue to call on people who have turned in correct
assignments to discuss that homework in class.
May 22. For those who are interested in the hide and seek
experiment and the logic that lies behind it, check out the
links
in the "additional
readings" section to our classroom results and to related
papers.
May 22. I have been asked how the scoring works if you take only
one of the two midterms. If you take both
midterms, the grade weights will be 20% for each quiz and 35% for
the
final exam,
15% for homework, and 10% for clicker score. If you take only one
midterm, we put extra weight on your final and your other midterm. In
this case the weights are 27.27% for the quiz you took, 47.73%
for the final, 15% for homework, and 10% for clicker score.
May 29. Midterms have now been graded. You can find
your score by clicking on Calvin below and entering your
perm number. Grade ranges and an answer sheet are found below.
June 4. I have posted your attendance
records below. Let me know if you think that your
record is incorrect.
June 5. My office hours on Thursday, June
8, will be from 2 pm to 3:25 pm rather than 3-4:30.
June 8. If your last name starts with the letters A-F, your
final exam will be in North Hall 2111. Otherwise, your
final will be in the regular classroom. Bring a Scantron sheet
and a pencil. Leave your cell phone at home.
Scantron Sheets
For midterms and the final, you need to bring Parscore
scantron sheets to class. They are called Form F-1712 and
are
the large reddish ones available at the bookstore and at the
Arbor. Do not get
your
scantron sheet crumpled and torn. Damaged sheets don't go through the
machine
properly and may cost you points on your quizzes.
Check here for
Additional Readings
You are expected to read this material, unless it is listed
as optional
For Chapter 17 Why
Wall
Street Hates IPO auctions . A second article on the same topic
For Chapter 27 A news
story on what can happen to colluders. An
article that provides more information about the
Christies-Sotheby collusion case. I recommend that you read
the news story and at least the first five pages of the article.
Optional readings: This
story, The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allen Poe has a charming
discussion of how a clever person might play a game like the hide and
seek game. Pay particular attention to the passage about the schoolboy
who won all the marbles in his school. This article, by economists
Ariel Rubenstein and Dana Heller, and psychologist , Amos Tversky,
presents a hide and seek game like the one that we played and discusses
the results. Their Design 4 is closest to the design of our
experiment, but our results are rather different, especially in the
hide phase. I think the main reason for this difference may be
that our hiders had already played seek, while their hiders never got
to play seek before they played hide. Here are the results from our class and
here are the results from an Econ 1 class
of about 500 students.
Answers
to Quizzes and Grade
Distribution
Grade ranges and answers for Quiz 1
Copy of Quiz 1, Form A, True-False and Multiple
Choice
Grade ranges for Quiz 2
Copy of Quiz 2, with answers
Check with Calvin, below, to find your score.
Your Clicker
Attendance
Click on Calvin and
Hobbes to see the number of classes that our clicker records show that
you have attended. True perfect attendance gives you a score of
15. I will give you credit for perfect attendance if your score
is 13 or higher.
Your Score on Quizzes
Scores for Quizzes 1 and 2 are now available. To find your score,
click on
the picture below, then
type
your perm number in the space where it is requested.
Office Hours of TAs and Instructor
Ted Bergstrom
North Hall 2052 Office hours:
Thursday 3-4:30 pm in my office and by appointment.
Section
Times
Office Location Office
Hours
Oddgeir Ottesen
You can address an e-mail message to either of us by clicking the name.
Lecture Slides
Some people have expressed the wish that they could see copies of the
lecture
notes because they weren't able to write everything down. It is
not
important to write everything down. What you should do is to pay
attention to the class discussion and try to understand as much as you
can during the discussion. I believe you will be better off reading the
textbook carefully and working problems than trying to memorize the
lecture
notes. But for those of you who really, really want lecture
notes, here are some notes. These notes are similar to but by no means
identical to the classroom lectures.
Chapter
17, Auctions
April 16--Auction Lecture
Chapter
18, Technology
Chapter
19, Profit Maximization
Chapter
20, Cost Minimization
Chapter
21, Cost Curves
Chapter
22, Firm Supply
Chapter
23, Industry Supply
Chapter
24, Monopoly
Chapter
25, Monopoly Behavior
Chapter
26,. Factor Markets
Chapter
27, Oligopoly
Chapter
28, Game Theory
Chapter 29, Exchange
Chapter
33, Externalities
Study Aids and Features
Economics
in Practice Interesting case studies related to your text, indexed
by chapter.
Economics in
Action
Articles from the Wall Street Journal dealing with topics
specifically
covered in class.
The Iowa Electronic Market.
An actual contingent-commodity market in which the contingencies are
outcomes
in political elections or events in the business world. If you
want
to speculate with some real money, the website explains how you can buy
and sell contingent commodities in this market.
The UBC Election Stock Market
A contingent-commodity market on political outcomes in the Great White
North. (home of the McKenzie brothers, Wayne Gretzky,
and Professor Garratt)
News Items
Varian's
Book inspires UCSB grad's Science Fiction
Need a Little Study Break?
Visit Calvin and
Hobbes