Category Archives: microeconomics

Efficiency: A Term to Use Sparingly

Microeconomic Theory II for PhD students starts again on Tuesday here at Temple University. I intend to talk about understanding economics as a way to (i) see clearly what the objectives are (whether they come from us as economists or … Continue reading

Posted in Public Economics, microeconomics | 3 Comments

Incentives matter and monopolies are terrible

Monopoly (or near monopoly) is always very bad for consumers. Check out this article from OSnews.com about Intel’s compiler that goes to some lengths to handicap non-Intel processors. I got more and more thankful for the free software folks (think … Continue reading

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Academic textbooks and healthcare incentives compared – Boing Boing

The always interesting Boing Boing blog has a long post on the market for academic textbooks and makes explicit comparisons of the incentives in this market and in the U.S. healthcare system. I won’t quote from the article, as it … Continue reading

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The pundits’ dilemma

Mark Liberman says this in the Language Log today, among other good points: Overall, the promotion of interesting stories in preference to accurate ones is always in the immediate economic self-interest of the promoter. It’s interesting stories, not accurate ones, … Continue reading

Posted in Mechanism Design, Public Economics, microeconomics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Paul Romer on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize

My old teacher Paul Romer has a fantastic post on Ostrom’s prize award. A long quote follows, but I do strongly recommend the whole thing: Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a … Continue reading

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Lecture Notes on Social Choice Theory

I am putting here a deck of Beamer slides that I made for my graduate microeconomics class at Temple University. I will be posting more as I deem the slide decks acceptable. It may take a while… Here it is: … Continue reading

Posted in Public Economics, microeconomics | 1 Comment

Excellent undergraduate micro course

Jeff Ely at Northwestern University has an excellent page with notes on his undergraduate microeconomics course. (The whole blog in which this appears, Cheap Talk, is very interesting, and you can find a link to it in my blogroll on … Continue reading

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