Economics
1: Winter 2006
Experiments with Economic Principles
Welcome Lab
Rats!
Instructor:
|
Office: North Hall 2052 email:tedb@econ.ucsb.edu |
Course Information
Personality Questionnaire In order to receive credit for experiments, you must answer this questionnaire.
You will need to know your section ID (the one you were given in your TA section, in order to check in.)
Watch Here for New Announcements
3/27 I have posted the answer keys for the final exam along with approximate grades on the final exam.
Your course grade was calculated as a weighted average of your percentage scores on the categories as
explained in the class syllabus. The scores rat has your score on the final exam and your course grade should be available on Gold.
3/17 The clicker company has agreed to buy back your clickers at full price. The bookstore will be
accepting returned clickers starting today and continuing through next week (except on Saturdays).
3/16 We are beginning to experience several problems with failing clickers. Apparently batteries are running out.
The manufacturer now admits that some of their clickers have a bad chip that causes the battery to run down prematurely. Because of this, I am going to drop everyone's lowest 4 clicker scores when calculating a score for the term. A few students who have been in touch with me have had failures on more than 4 occasions. For these students I will adjust scores accordingly.
Thurs, 3/16 Location of Final Exam. If your last name starts with A, B , Y, or Z, go to Buchanan Hall
Room 1940 for your final exam. If your last name starts with C, go to South Hall 1431. All others (D-X)
go to Campbell Hall. Do not bring cell phones or other electronic communications device. If we see you using
any such device during the exam, your exam will be confiscated and you will fail the course.
Bring a picture ID. We will be checking IDs for all students. Don't forget to bring a scantron and a pencil.
Sunday, 3/12 I have added some links to readings that relate to our course discussions. I will ask you to
read the paper on Sotheby and Christie by Ashenfeldter and Graddy as well as Gary Becker's blog.None of the other new readings are required, but in case you are interested, they will still be available at this site, even after the course is over. There is also a new practice problem on externalities.
Friday, 3/10 I have now posted the answer keys and approximate grade distribution for Quiz 3. The clicker rat
has your individual scores on all 3 quizzes. Remember that we will base your quiz grade entirely on your two
best quiz scores.
Wednesday, 3/8 Monday's click-in question asked people to state the highest tuition rate at which they still would have chosen to attend UCSB. As I said on Monday, I am going to ask a question on Friday, based on these results. In particular, I want you to figure out what tuition rate would have extracted the highest total revenue from the people currently enrolled in this class. Click here to get the data that you need in Excel form
Click here to get this data in an html file.
3/3 I have posted an article by economists Orley Ashenfelter and Kathleen Graddy, about the Sotheby-Christie
price-fixing case. This article presents a fascinating account of the events and the economic and legal background.
It is all quite accessible, with the possible exception of the section on Injuries, Part A: "The Effect on Buyers."
The argument made here appears to depend on the details of the auction mechanism, but the idea is really quite
simple. If (and I think this is an awfully big if), the supply of art being sold is very price inelastic, then just as the
burden of a sales tax falls mainly on the sellers, it would also be the case that most of the burden of excessive
commissions falls on the sellers. To read this article, click here.
3/3 On Monday, I will ask more questions based on the the IPOD survey.
The results are posted on an Excel spreadsheet, and for those of
you who don't have Excel, as a text file. Click here to find the questions that I will ask and the data from
the survey. Try to work out the answers before Friday's lecture.
2/27 The money bag now shows your winnings and score on Experiment 8.
2/6 An alert student pointed out an error to me in the notes for Feb 3. I have now corrected this error in the
posted notes. The error was in the slide Session 3--Resale of Drugs. The correction is as follow. The
slide should say In Session 2, seller produces 20 and sells 10 (not produces 40 and sells 20). It should also say
In Session 3, the seller produces 10 and sells 5, while the police also sell 5. (not produces 20 and sells 10).
2/5 I have posted a short blog article on the failure of drug prohibition by Nobel Prize winner, Gary Becker.
This article is assigned reading. Don't miss it.
Notes on clicker problems:
Properly
registered clickers should flash green when you press a button
and polling is open in class.
If your clicker does not flash green, when pressed during polling, try the following:
Click "Go" on your clicker, then click "4" then click "1" then click "Go" again. This resets the transmission channel to 41.
Your clicker should come preset on Channel 41 when you get it from the bookstore, so normally you don't need to do this.
If your clicker does not flash green, when pressed during polling, try the following:
Click "Go" on your clicker, then click "4" then click "1" then click "Go" again. This resets the transmission channel to 41.
Your clicker should come preset on Channel 41 when you get it from the bookstore, so normally you don't need to do this.
1/31 If you haven't yet taken the personality questionnaire, don't forget to do so. Remember you need to take
this questionnaire to get attendance credit for sections.
Here we supply some slides that are used in the lectures. Just click
on the appropriate date below. The slides use Macromedia's Flash,
a program common to interactive web pages. If you have a
recent
version
of Netscape or Internet Explorer, you should be able to view them
without a problem. If you can't view them from your
browser,
try a computer at any of the university's computing labs.
Click here for lectures.
Readings:
The failure of the War on Drugs Blog entry by Gary Becker, March 5, 2005 (Required reading)
Free Entry and the Realty Business
Anatomy of the Rise and Fall of a Price-Fixing Conspiracy: Auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's (Required reading)
by Orley Ashenfelter and Kathryn Graddy, from Journal of Competition Law and Economics.
The following readings are not required, but they are likely to be of interest to the curious among you.
The Economics of Traffic Congestion, by Richard Arnott and Kenneth Small, American Scientist , Sept-Oct 1994
Why Restaurants Fail, by H. G. Parsa et al Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly
Endangered Species, New York Times magazine article about free entry and real estate agents, by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
The Purloined Letter, short story by Edgar Allen Poe
The failure of the War on Drugs Blog entry by Gary Becker, March 5, 2005 (Required reading)
Free Entry and the Realty Business
Anatomy of the Rise and Fall of a Price-Fixing Conspiracy: Auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's (Required reading)
by Orley Ashenfelter and Kathryn Graddy, from Journal of Competition Law and Economics.
The following readings are not required, but they are likely to be of interest to the curious among you.
The Economics of Traffic Congestion, by Richard Arnott and Kenneth Small, American Scientist , Sept-Oct 1994
Why Restaurants Fail, by H. G. Parsa et al Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly
Endangered Species, New York Times magazine article about free entry and real estate agents, by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
The Purloined Letter, short story by Edgar Allen Poe
Click
here for Answers and Grade Distributions for Final exam and
quizzes
The Test Scores Rat
Click the rat below to look up your scores on quizzes.
In the window that opens, click on the "test" box and
choose
the quiz for which you want the score.
Enter your
perm number (not your class id) in the box labelled "id
number."
Then click on "Get Score". A little box will appear with
your
score on the selected quiz.
The Test Scores Rat
Note:
We do not negotiate grades. Pleas for a better (or a worse)
grade
will fall on deaf ears..
Clicker rat is now reporting your clicker scores from each lecture, starting with January 20. Click the rat, and enter your PERM NUMBER. Click the drop-down menu to select the date for which you want a score. For each of these days, any answer to the first question gets you 5 points. For the other questions, a correct answer gets you 5 points and a wrong answer gets you 1 point. You can look up the questions and their answers by going to the lecture notes link. and opening the Clicker questions files with Microsoft Power Point. Perfect scores for each session are found in the table below the rat.
March 13 scoring. Everybody who participated got 10 points for playing the hide-and-seek games. A perfect score for the day
was 25.
March 10 scoring. The first question (on tuition) is worth 5 points if you got it right and 1 point if you clicked and got it wrong.
In the traffic game, everybody scored at least 13 points. Those whose total commuting time was in the bottom third of the class
got 15 points. Those in the middle third got 14 points and those in the top third got 13 points. If you didn't click either alternative in a round, we counted you as taking an hour to get to work on that day.
March 15 scoring. Everyone who participated got 15 points.
I have posted everyone's total score with the lowest 4 daily scores dropped. The top score after dropping everyone's 4 lowest scores is 341. The median score after the 4 lowest scores are dropped is about 275.
| Date |
Points |
Date |
Points |
Date |
Points |
Date |
Points |
|||
| J20 |
25 |
F3 |
30 |
F15 |
20 |
M13 |
25 |
|||
| J23 |
25 |
F6 |
20 |
F22 |
37 |
M15 | 15 |
|||
| J25 |
20 |
F8 |
20 |
M03 |
27 |
M17 |
20 |
|||
| J30 |
25 |
F10 |
20 |
M06 |
20 |
|||||
| F1 |
25 |
F13 |
35 |
M10 |
20 |
Profits
Click the money bag below to look up your profits in the Experiments. In the window that opens, click on the "test" box and choose
the item for which you want the score. Enter your Class ID number (not your perm number) in the box labelled "id number." Then
click on "Get Score"
The Profits Money Bag
Your profit is the sum of the profits
you made in all the sessions and rounds of an experiment. Your
score is profits normalized according to your type. First, for
each type,
we sort the profits in all sections from lowest to
highest.
Everyone whose profit is in the 80th percentile or above has winnings
of 10. Everyone in the 20th percentile or
below has winnings of 2.
Everyone else's winnings are calculated according to the following
formula:
Practice, Practice, Practice....
Practice
Questions for Chapter 1
Practice Questions for Chapter 2
Practice Questions on Elasticity
Practice Questions on Chapter 3
More Practice with taxation
Practice Questions on Chapter 4
Problems
on Price Ceilings
Practice Questions on Chapter 5
Practice Questions on Externalities,
Chapter 6
Practice Questions on Monopoly, Chapter 7
Practice Questions on Entry and
Exit, chapter 8
Homework Answers
Click here to find answers to your homework assignments.Miscellaneous News Items
- Medical Advice on Learning
- Calvin and Hobbes Just in case you need a short study break