Questions tagged [microeconomics]
Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the market behavior of individual actors (usually firms and consumers) and the aggregation of their actions in different institutional frameworks (usually the market).
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questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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How big is the consumer surplus for typical consumer goods?
Economic transactions happen when both think it will benefit them - that is, when there are gains from trade on both sides. But that says nothing about the size of that gain. If you're a consumer, ...
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206 views
MWG Example 3.E.1
I do not understand how Mas-Collel, Whinston, and Green derive the Hicksian demand functions in Example 3.E.1 in their textbook.
Allow me to give further background regarding the problem: The ...
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53 views
Is a lack of “rules” dangerous for cryptocurrency
An issue/disadvantage that the gold standard had was a lack of mechanisms that forced economies to abide by the rules of the game. As a result, they could at any time de-monetize gold and therefore ...
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59 views
Why are share repurchases particularly accretive?
From the "Manual of Ideas"...
VALUE CREATION VIA BUYBACKS Share repurchases tend to be particularly accretive in the case of companies generating cash from operations while trading below tangible ...
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141 views
Deriving a Best Response Function in Baik (1994)
I'm reading a game-theory related paper*, and I'm not following the derivation of some property of the best-response functions.
Suppose I have two players $1$ and $2$, whose strategies are ...
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79 views
General Equilibrium allocation holding fixed a consumer's utility
I'm having some issues with solving this general equilibrium exercise.
The way I started off is by assuming that since consumer 2's utility is fixed, he will have a fixed utility function. Then ...
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60 views
Deviating from Cournot-Nash
Suppose player $1$ and $2$ are playing a simultaneous move game where with continuous strategies $x_1$ and $x_2$. The Cournot equilibrium is $x_1^*,x_2^*$. The following diagram purports to show that ...
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107 views
What's the relation between deadweight-loss and alpha in Cobb-Douglas?
I'm studying for an exam and facing a question about the relationship between the $\alpha$ of the Cobb-Douglas function and the loss of utility of imposing taxes.
If I have understood correctly, ...
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94 views
A manifold of agents?
In contract theory and mechanism design, if the agents have one-dimensional characteristics, then they are usually considered as a contiuum on $\mathbb R$; if they have n-dimensional type, then they ...
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162 views
Intertemporal choice with no income flow in the second period
Question:
Suppose Mr X maximises his utility for two periods, his total utility is given by log $c_1$ + $\beta$ log $c_2$ where $\beta$ $\in$ ( 0,1) and $c_1$ and $c_2$ are his consumption for ...
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202 views
Non-linear budget constraints written as union/intersection of linear budget constraints
Let $w$ denote wage. Let the price of each unit of food be $p_1$, the price of the first $M$ units of electricity be $p_2$ and the price of each unit of electricity over $M$ units is $q_2$. $M$ is ...
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46 views
Terminology for separability in price and value
Take an agent with mean-variance utility over something that is uncertain:
$$
U(x) = \mu_x^\theta - \sigma_x^\lambda
$$
$A\in \{0,1\}$ happens if $U(x)>0$, and $x$ is a random variable
$$
A = \...
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47 views
Firms Entry/Exit Due to Economic Profit in a Perfectly Competitive Market
According to the textbooks,in a long run equilibrium, the market price will be equal to the minimum point of firm's ATC curve. But every firm's ATC curve will differ i.e each one of them will have ...
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70 views
Technology, Prices, and the Derived Demand for Energy
I was reading the paper by Berndt and Wood (1975), "Technology, Prices, and the Derived Demand for Energy". It was an interesting paper to read but there has not been anything done on this in nearly ...
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186 views
General equilibrium papers on universal basic income
Are there any microeconomics or general equilibrium articles on universal basic income?
Papers dealing with general wealth transfer mechanisms where a basic universal income would be a subset of the ...
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83 views
How can I model immigration and xenophobia economically using these equations?
I'm trying to put together a toy model for immigration ($I$), labor prices ($w$), and a measure of xenophobic/nationalistic sentiment ($A$). What I've come up with so far is the following:
$$\frac{dI}...
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85 views
Price discrimination
If I have 3 consumers who I want to sell package 1, 2 and 3 to respectively. Meaning consumer 1 I would like to sell package 1 to, consumer 2 I would like to sell package 2 to and so on. The packages ...
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77 views
Increased inflation rate on borrowers and lenders
I'm trying to understand a concept in microeconomics. So if inflation increases while nominal interest rate stays the same, what are the substitution effects and income effects on borrowers and ...
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87 views
Metric for evaluating sales with dynamic pricing
Suppose you have a sausage maker. He buys batches of ground meat, then makes and sells sausages. Suppose each batch of ground meat makes N sausages, and each batch has specific level of quality that ...
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201 views
How does one derive the elasticity of substitution with implicit functions?
I would like to derive the elasticity of substitution. I'm aware that such a thread with a very straightforward explanation already exists, but my case is slightly different and I'm not sure how to ...
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21 views
Perfect complement outputs with each output being composed of substitutable inputs
How does one solve the following maximization problem?
$\underset{K_1, K_2, L_1, L_2}{\text{maximize }} min\{K_1 + L_1,K_2 + L_2\}$
subject to $c(K_1 + \mu K_2) + \beta c(L_1 + \mu L_2)$
where $c(...
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21 views
Microeconomics and management science of professional open source companies?
Are there research (and stories more broadly) about professional open source companies? To what types of products their are appropriate, what licensing schemes to choose? How to managed patents and IP?...
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49 views
Can the Goodwin Model of cyclical labor growth be applied in a micro context to specific industries?
I have been doing a bit of research into the Goodwin Model (1967), which generates cycles of economic activity. I understand that this is mostly used in macroeconomics. However, I am curious if this ...
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48 views
What is the name for this turn-based property trading game?
Does anyone know what the following allocation strategy is called?
Problem:
How to allocate N rooms to N roommates? Example: allocate 4 rooms
(1,2,3,4) amongst 4 roommates (A,B,C,D) total rent of $...
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29 views
Some issues with HRS (Health and Retirement Study) data
I am using the 1992 HRS (Health and Retirement Study) dataset. The
codebook is available at
http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/modules/meta/1992/core/codebook/14_h1.htm
I am trying to construct the share ...
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34 views
Where to start, to know the cost, in hours of work, necessary to produce one more car (or any other good)?
Let's say I want to buy a car. It costs that, so I can know that, for example, I have to work 3 months to pay for it. But does the car really needs three months of human work to be build?
What is the ...
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18 views
competitive equilibrium with density functions
Assume there are two competitive markets for goods a and b. Each consumer will either purchase one unit of a and none of b, or one of b and none of a. Consumers never consume both goods. Utilities are ...
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246 views
How to compute Social Welfare in this model?
The first part of this scientific article analyzes reward-based crowdfunding. The assumptions are:
Seller is a monopolist
Unit mass of consumers
Unit demand
Two periods
Individuals are identified by $...
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218 views
How Would a Firm Which Produces a Giffen Good Maximize Profits?
I am curious as to how a firm which produces a giffen good would maximize profits? Having an upward sloping demand curve seems to imply that we cannot guarantee that there exists a quantity where ...
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796 views
Shape of Isoprofit Curves for Strategic Complements
Two goods are strategic complements if:
$$\frac{\partial \pi_1}{\partial q_2}>0\;\text{and}\;\frac{\partial \pi_2}{\partial q_1}>0$$
The image below is a picture of best response functions and ...
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38 views
What are the currently accepted methods to estimate a firm's productivity?
While there are a lot of methods one can think of, like computing the ratio of profits to assets or profits to sales, apparently it is a difficult problem.
It would be useful to know how effectively ...
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35 views
How do environmental deregulations push an economy inside its Production Possibility Frontier and make it inefficient?
I read in a textbook that if we plot a PPF with automobile manufacturing and clean air as the axes and the company pollutes the state making clean air (a public good) scarce, automobile manufacturing ...
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110 views
Why shouldn't the relative prices change in the Heckscher-Ohlin model?
I'm having trouble with the Rybczynski theorem. Let's say there's a migration to the domestic economy, increasing the Labor endowment. It states that the production of the good that uses labor more ...
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22 views
Is there a simple way to write a model with firms/sectors with different demand elasticities?
I would like to write down a model where there are firms with different demand elasticities: For some firm's total profits increase and decrease a lot with increases and decreases in demand for their ...
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256 views
Robinson Crusoe economy with saving and borrowing
I am working with a Robinson Crusoe economy, i.e. an economy in which there is no production and only consumption is possible: there are only two goods, $x_1$ and $x_2$.
There is just one individual ...
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136 views
Existence of a Competitive Equilibrium
My professor gives us these conditions for the existence of a Competitive Equilibrium (CE) in a pure exchange economy:
$U^i$ is continuous, strictly increasing and strictly concave for all $i$ and $\...
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404 views
Calculating a cross price substitution/income effect
I am given a utility function $U(x,y)$, income $I$ and prices $p_x,p_y$. Then the price of $y$ rises to $p_y' = 3 \cdot p_y$. How are we supposed to calculate the substitution effect and income effect ...
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56 views
Stiglitz 1976 on irrelevance of corporate financial policy
In this paper, Stiglitz gives a verbal argument as follows:
Let us consider verbally what actions of the individuals are required to offset various actions by the firm. Assume the ...
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80 views
A high store loyalty indicates what kind of competition among cement retailers selling products of the same brand?
To provide some context, this question occurred to me while I was considering the cement retail market. If one considers retailers selling cement of only one brand, then the concept of brand loyalty ...
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60 views
Market with substitutes: Response of prices and quantities
The demand function for theater tickets is $D_t(p_t,p_c)$, where $p_t$ stands for the price of theater tickets and $p_c$ stands for the price of cinema tickets. Supply of theater tickets is described ...
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55 views
Separate optimization problem versus one big Lagrangean
I am a bit confused about when to consider a separate optimization problem and when to combine different problems into a single optimization problem.
Consider an individual who derives utility from ...
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161 views
Microeconomic Model of Knowledge and Technology
Can you point me to any microeconomic models of knowledge and technology?
It is intended to be used for simulation.
The problem that arises is that you need to simulate the effects of technology on ...
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262 views
Convex consumer preferences
Man has blue and red marbles. If he has more red marbles then blue one he wants to exchange one red for two blue($1R:2B$). If otherwise (more blue then red)he wants to exchange one blue for two red($...
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1k views
A stable equilibrium with demand and supply?
My doubt pertains to something that is mentioned in the book by Koutsoyiannis for microeconomics (in the chapter for general equilibrium).
http://www.upload.ee/image/5306829/1.jpg
http://www.upload....
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483 views
Short Run vs Long Run Cost Functions
Let $z_a$ and $z_b$ are two vectors of inputs. $z_a$ is variable in both long run and short run however $z_b$ is only variable in long run.
Now let's suppose that the price of one of the inputs in ...
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285 views
Curvature of Cost and Production Function
I have been trying to understand the duality theory between cost and production function. Please let me know if my following statement is correct;
If the cost function $C(w,q)$ is convex in $q$, the ...
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86 views
how can devaluation of a nation's currency lead to increase in government expenditure, hence facilitating economic growth
how can devaluation of a nation's currency lead to increase in government expenditure, hence facilitating economic growth.
I was reading through a textbook and saw that the devaluation of a nation's ...
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29 views
Business agreement design - is there science behind this?
I am working on schemas how advertisement space is sold to the ad agencies, ad networks and individual customers. There are lot of questions involved how to design the business agreement. E.g. one can ...
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Question about nested input requirements
In Michael Carter's "Foundation of Mathematical Economics" we have the following exercise:
Prove that the input requirement sets are nested. That is, prove that $V(y') \supseteq V(y)$ $ \forall $ $y'...
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269 views
Semi Annual Deposit that earns 5% Compounded Quarterly
I was asked:
A man planned to endow 1000000 USD to his son on his son's 21'st
birthday. How much is his semi-annual deposit in a special account
that earns 5% compounded quarterly if the first ...
