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The mathematical reason, is that this happens in order for the model to have a steady-state in terms of growth rates: variables like Consumption, Capital, Income, grow at the steady-state, but grow at the same rate, so their ratios remain constant (and it is in this sense that this situation represents a "steady"-state). If they were to grow at different ...

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In addition to @KennyLJ 's answer, I think it's worth pointing out that your points require some pretty restrictive assumptions about the demand for food delivery. Some individuals might substitute calling and placing an order with going online, but certainly not all. Given that the app itself might encourage some people to order delivery (or take out) who ...

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This is a long comment that is too long for the comment box. In fact, many research projects in US are secretive, especially the ones related to military. At the same time, much, much more research projects in China are secretive, including some agricultural ones, which are not military-related but considered as national security-related by Chinese ...

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In the Cobb Douglas production function technological progress can be thought of as either labor or capital augmenting, it doesn't matter. Under Cobb Douglas: $Y_t = F(A_t, K_t, L_t) = A_t \cdot K_t^\alpha \cdot L_t^{1-\alpha}$ Which can be written as Labor augmenting: $Y_t = K_t^\alpha \cdot (A_t^{1/(1-\alpha)} \cdot L_t)^{1-\alpha} = F(K_t,\hat A_t ... 5 My guess is that it is not a new factor of production, but simply a type of total factor productivity. This is because: factors of production are a stock, which produce services. What is the stock of AI? The stock of labour is easy to calculate. The stock of capital is more complex, but at least all capital goods (even robots) have a market price. As such, ... 5 In my youth, pizza delivery was my way to make money, so I have some understanding of how the economics work in practice. Taking orders is expensive. It takes several minutes and can require that the order taker clean their hands before and after taking the order. Before because it's hard to read something covered in tomato sauce; after because they ... 4 Your assumption is correct. Value added is Gross Output-intermediate consumption(inputs). value-added approach is a simple measure that ignores the difficulties of dealing with inter-industry and intra-industry flows of goods and services. Intermediate inputs are simply excluded here. The value-added approach provides a simple link of industry-level MFP ... 4 Two very general reasons are: 1) High prices at the beginning target "early adopters" - people that have a higher "willingness to pay" for a new product just to have it first. Early adopters know that they pay more, and they 're ok with it. 2) As regards consumer reaction, it is much better to reduce prices than to increase prices. So sometimes prices are ... 4 In addition to (intertemporal) price discrimination, there's a parallel process of ramping up production. Especially with tech products, they can have bugs at the beginning, even with all the precautions during design/prototyping. So a massive launch at high production volume is more risky. (Lower production volume also implies higher unit price; see ... 4 I want to flesh out the answers from Alecos Papadopoulos and Bill Clark to make sure it's clear why a firm might want to reduce prices over time—known as intertemporal price discrimination. Suppose there are two groups of potential customers: enthusiasts (who love the product) and laymen (who aren't very interested in the product). Enthusiasts are willing ... 4 Provided that increasing returns to scale apply over the whole production function of the company it is likely that it would become natural monopoly. For example, Mankiw in Principles of Economics (pp 292) in some passages even defines monopolies in relation to their cost function: When a firm’s average-total-cost curve continually declines, the firm has ... 3 Consider a Leontief production function: $$Y = \text{min}(aL,bK)$$ Optimal capital-labour ratio is: $$\frac{K^*}{L^*}=\frac{a}{b}$$ Labour-saving technical change is such that$a$increases. The optimal capital-labour ratio increases, this is, firms use less labour per unit of capital. This is also called Capital-augmenting technical change (see ... 3 I would say these are some proxies Number of patents Number of published scientific papers Human capital 3 I'm an economist by training who also is a programmer and works with a lot of data scientists, so I've some insight into this area. One of my projects at the Urban Institute is trying to bridge the gap between these fields, and part of our work, supported by the Sloan Foundation, is publicly available here. To some degree the answer is yes, but there are ... 3 Yes, this is pretty standard stuff in economics. First, the simplest models contain it in a hidden form. Supply curves are derived from production functions, and include (marginal) cost of production. Technology innovation is then reflected in reduced production costs per unit. It can also change the indifference curves of consumers, leading to changes in ... 3 The only "perpetual motion machine" is life itself. No it is not. We also convert energy to heat as we go through life. We are certainly not immune to the second law of thermodynamics, we increase entropy all the time. Machines cannot run or reproduce themselves. Why not? There is already factory robots making other robots. But of course, they run on ... 3 There exists also a tendancy to treat growth models with heterogeneous agents. I think the question is not to use the right growth model but contribute to the theory by trying to change "representative agent" framework. That's why there exists so many growth models with heterogeneous agents in recent years. I don't think at all that endogenous growth ... 3 Oded Galor's interesting work on Unified Growth Theory subsumes the Solow model, the Malthusian model and endogenous growth theories in a very stylized way. This model is of course "long term" and ignores institutions. It is a OLG model where the main problem from the household side is a choice between quantity versus quality of offspring (human capital ... 3 People aren't ignoring things like raw material, energy, and land, they're abstracting them. They're saying, "We don't want to keep track of each of these separately, so we'll say that for our purposes, as an input to production, they're all really the same thing: capital." Whether that level of abstraction is appropriate for a specific problem can be ... 3 A clarification: The values$w,r$are not independent of input combinations: you have already solved for$K/L$. 1) Unless you assume that the price of the output is equal to 1, there is a minor mistake, as output prices affect factor prices. 2) If there is a profit maximizing pair$(K,L)$, then for all$\alpha \in \mathbb{R}_+(\alpha K,\alpha L)$will ... 3 This is a subtle issue. First let's present a numerical example to see the head-scratching riddle. Assume $$\alpha =1/2 \implies Y = K^{1/2}L^{1/2}$$ and that the exogenously given input prices are $$r=1/8,\,\, w=4.$$ The f.o.c are $$\begin{cases} \frac {Y}{2K} = 1/8 \\ \\ \frac{Y}{2L} = 4 \end{cases} \implies K/4 = 8L \implies \left(L/K\right)^* = 1/32... 3 It can be shown that a firm with increasing returns to scale (IRTS) and no market power makes a negative profit (and may not be observed at all, in the long run). Conclusion: either subsidies, or market power is necessary for a firm with global IRTS to be sustainable. With usual notations, the claim follows from the first order condition for an (inner) ... 3 Besides the great answers already given, adding my two cents: A firm ends up being a sole player in the sector when market entry for others is restricted, which may not be guaranteed by IRTS or even continual economies of scale. First, it is important to realize that, contrary to our first naive intuition, IRTS does not imply economies if scale. See this for ... 3 fall in price arising from the labor savings The price of a product is usually determined in part by its cost. (This holds in almost all theoretical models without strict capacity constraints, even in the extreme case of monopoly.) If automation can replace some of the labor with cheaper machines, cost will decrease, hence the product will be sold at a ... 2 Probably if you go to almost any country in the world, however poor, you will find considerable use of relatively cheap cutting-edge consumer technology such as smartphones and some more expensive cutting-edge technologies used in manufacturing or service industries. However, there is a big gap between 'adopting' cutting-edge technology at that level and ... 2 I' m not sure its a law, its what has happened because manufacturing productivity has moved faster. Indeed, the robot economy might well get rid of most service jobs and we'll all be making or programming service robots for each other. It's related to this paper Buera-Kaboski, Rise of the Service Economy But here are some potential explanations: Maybe ... 2 Many obstacles to converting common goods into private goods are legal or normative rather than technological. For example, the technology necessary for congestion pricing of traffic is long established and indeed in use since the 1970's in Singapore. The existence of electronic transmitters or plate readers (London) may make for finer gradations of pricing ... 2 Institutions like banks for many years now keep back-up archives of their data in physical locations owned and operated by other legal entities. This is a standard case of outsourcing to specialists a requirement of a business process that is not a directly value-added activity. So the "sole custodian of one's own data" has been proven in the market not to ... 2 Would you rather work with a tractor or shovel? Would you rather use one hand to work or two?... Mathemathically the formula is:$$EL = \mathrm{GDP}_r$$That is, efficiency ($/h) times hours worked per year equals the real GDP. Same is true for your personal life and personal income. Now, if efficiency decreases, you must either work more or live with ...

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