Podcast #128: We chat with Kent C Dodds about why he loves React and discuss what life was like in the dark days before Git. Listen now.

# Tag Info

10

Your formula $\mu = \sum\limits_{i=0}^n x_i$ just denotes the total amount of goods, so this just means that $\mu$ units were distributed among $n$ agents. Scarcity (in this context) means that no matter how you distribute these $\mu$ units, as long as everything else is unchanged (ceteris paribus) at least one agent would like to get more, i.e. $\forall (... 8 An interesting question that leads to a debate among econometricians. Some consider that Econometrics is just statistics applied to economic problems Econometrics is just statistics applied to economic problems—nothing more and nothing less. We should probably call it “statistical economics,” but I guess people feel that the term “econometrics” has ... 7 So, here goes: Gross Profit = Revenue - COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) If you bought an orange for a dollar and sold it for two, you have one dollar of Gross Profit Operating Profit = Gross Profit - Labor - SG&A If you're business paid someone \$100 to sell 200 oranges (like above), you would have \$200 in Gross profit, and \$100 in Operating Profit (...

7

I do not have a special term, but I give this analogy: We know what a triangle is. But in the real world, it is impossible to draw a perfect triangle and there do not exist examples of perfect triangles. Similarly, we have just learnt what perfect competition is. But in the real world, there do not exist examples of perfect competition. Nonetheless, ...

6

"Intelligent money" or "smart money" is not an economic term per se, but a finance term. It is colloquially used in the finance industry to describe the collective group of individuals who are paid to actively manage funds, rather than passively manage funds. Active management differs from passive management in that the former chooses how to invest money ...

6

Full employment is a more general term, which has much less implication than natural rate of employment. My experience reading a lot of economics papers is that careful authors do not mix the two concepts. Stricto sensu, full employment should mean 100% of the workforce is employed. But when we are talking about periods such as the trente glorieuses, the ...

6

Competitive Equilibrium A competitive equilibrium ("Walrasian Equilibrium")'s defining characteristic is that it's competitive. It's about an equilibrium in which market forces (say, consumers, firms)' supply and demand responds to prices, and prices respond to supply and demand, and no Pareto-improving trade possibility remains in the end. To be technical,...

6

The journal Management Science is a decent one. Many economists do publish on that journal. In fact, a quick look at its editorial board reveals many notable names, with the recent Nobel laureate in Economics Richard Thaler among the associate editors. The field of management science is more interdisciplinary in nature. See Wikipedia's entry for it. To me, ...

6

What players are trying to do is always up for interpretation, it is not coded into the mathematics of game theory. The madman strategy can be modelled as a Bayesian game, with different types having different payoffs, and one player sending a signal about their type, the other player observing the signal. A situation in which types are indistinguishable ...

6

Not all cdf’s have a density function, (for example if $F$ is not differentiable). However, when they do have a density, the notation $dF(z)$ is equivalent to $f(z)dz$. When performing integrals. However, even if the density does not exists, you can still write the expectation using the notation $dF(z)$. The details of what it actually means and the subtle ...

6

I usually use the phrase "Pareto worsening". It is not really widespread, in fact I am not sure I have ever heard anyone else use it. However now I googled it and people seem to use it in connection with Hart's 1975 paper wherein he shows that the opening of some new markets can make every agent worse off. Hart himself did not call this Pareto worsening, but ...

5

What it means is the following: Consider the same bargaining game played by two players that are fully informed (i.e. the buyer is also informed about the value of $q$). Then find the equilibrium of this game and calculate welfare. This is the full information welfare'' that the question refers to. Then solve the model where only the seller is informed ...

5

Probably, there's no clear-cut definition, however, there's an article of Paul Graham called Startup=Growth which represents the opinion many agree upon: startup is a company that plans to grow fast (... and scale). A quote: A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it ...

5

Plamen Nikolov of Binghamton University presents a brief treatment of this in "Writing Tips For Economics Research Papers". He notes that there are two basic rules of economic usage: "Long run" (without a hyphen) is a noun. "Long-run" (with a hyphen) is an adjective. Same with short(-)run. and "Saving" (without a terminal s) is a flow. "Savings" (...

5

I think the terminology below is pretty unambiguous and also common: a shift in the demand curve to refer to movements from $D$ to $\tilde D$ (using shift is quite more specific than using change, as it more clearly refer to a change in the whole demand schedule). a movement along the demand curve to refer to changes in $D(P)$ induced by movements ...

5

Yes. Anyone who utilizes their privately owned property or assets as a means of production for the sake of profit is a capitalist. In this case the farmer's capital is the land which they use for agricultural production.

5

From the Wikipedia article: Economists describe a consumer as "prudent" if he or she saves more when faced with riskier future income. This additional saving is called precautionary saving. For risk averse consumers with thrice differentiable utility $u^{\prime\prime\prime}>0$ is a necessary and sufficient condition for consumers to save more for ...

5

Two main changes happened when capitalism came into existence these being the ability to buy and sell property among the peasantry. Under the feudal system each household was endowed land which was used to produce food/ agricultural products for the household and the lord which provided the land. When feudalism was abolished the possibilities of production ...

5

Entry price system (EPS) is a EU-specific term relating to their food import tariffs, more specifically to fruits and vegetables. It's a somewhat complicated system designed to strongly discourage imports below a certain price. This is a summary from 2009 paper: The EU protects growers of 15 kinds of selected fruits and vegetables against international ...

5

In a standard cheap-talk setting, a sender (S) has better information on a state of the world and wants to communicate this information to a receiver (R) who then takes an action. However, S and R prefer different actions conditional on the state. Importantly, S is free to send any message independent of what she knows. That is, she cannot commit to a signal ...

5

I guess it might depend on the author. Here's another classification: The classifications of public goods associated to agriculture identify two main categories: environmental goods and non-environmental goods (or social goods). In the first category are placed those public goods closely related to environmental externalities, such as farmland ...

4

Not paying a mortgage is first known as delinquency (when payments are missed) and later, default (when the loan is written down and the lender seeks foreclosure). But an inability to pay has no particular term of art attached to it, because an inability to pay can arise either out of illiquidity (debts exceed liquid assets) or insolvency (debts exceed ...

4

OK, Erel Segal Halevi's comments have placed me on the right track for finding what I was looking for; This family of games is called "Resource Selection Games", and it has quite a few papers written on it (such as this one).

4

It has been argued that the concept of present value was implicit in Liber Abaci (1202) by Leonardo of Pisa (also known as Fibonacci). This paper by Goetzmann makes this claim in its abstract and introduction, and presents (pp 26-7) an example from Liber Abaci of what appears to be present value analysis.

4

I suspect you have found the author responsible for the original coinage of the word "externality" within economics, with this meaning. In the 1950s (and earlier), the discussion of externalities was typically done using the phrase "external economies", as Francis M. Bator frequently did too. Bator built on Scitovsky (1954) and Meade (1952), both of whom ...

4

The strict logic opposite of course is simply any change where at least one person is worse off but not sure we need a name for that. The conceptual opposite to Pareto improvement can as you say be a change where no one is better off and at least one person is worse of. Existing Antonyms to "improvement" As for what to call it, the Thersaurus does indeed ...

3

Consider a production function $$y = F(A,K,L)$$ where $A$ represent "technology" (in the broad sense including for example also organizational technology), $K$ is capital and $L$ is labor (again both broadly defined) "Economies of scale" (a looser synonym of increasing returns to scale), is, in economics, always defined with respect to all arguments in ...

3

The Rawlsian welfare function, which takes the form of the min of all agent's utility, is often called the maximin function, because it maximizes minimum utility. In the spirit of that nomenclature, your function is a maximax utility function. And, apparently, this function does see some use. It is sometimes called the optimistic decision criteria, because a ...

3

Suppose the economy is in a state where one person could be made better off without making anyone worse off. Most people would agree this is not a good state to be in, i.e. we can do better. That means a "pareto improvement" is possible. So what we would want is to in fact make that person better off (as no one else gets harmed and one person benefits). ...

3

You may be seeing the same thing that I'm seeing (on social media), and I've added the links below as evidence of this, more often than not, they don't define what they mean (in this case, they do - for instance, you'll see "the smart money is moving against the USD" etc). This term is very common on social media stock discussions. StockTwit example ...

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