This article describes the current relationship between management education in Colombia and the efforts of the management program at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB) in Medellin to reduce local poverty. The article uses the metaphor of "the bubble" to illustrate how social class, family socialization, and the current UPB…

The author describes a classroom experiment that illustrates the welfare effects of allocating a good on a first-come, first-served basis. In the first round, each student must decide how long to wait in an imaginary line for candy, without knowing how much will be distributed or how long others are willing to wait. In making this decision, a…

Recent research has demonstrated that active learning techniques improve student comprehension and retention of abstract economic ideas such as rent seeking. Instructors can reinforce the concept of rent seeking with a classroom game, particularly one involving real money. The authors improve upon a game first introduced by Goeree and Holt (1999)…

Principle of duality and numerical calculation of income and substitution effects under Hicksian Compensation are often left out of intermediate microeconomics courses because they require a rigorous calculus based analysis. But these topics are critically important for understanding consumer behavior. In this paper we use excel solver--a…

This chapter demonstrates how institutional researchers at institutions of higher education can use economic theory for enrollment management. (Contains 4 figures.)

The authors show how microeconomic concepts and principles are applicable to the study of terrorism. The utility maximization model provides insights into both terrorist resource allocation choices and government counterterrorism efforts, and basic game theory helps characterize the strategic interdependencies among terrorists and governments.…

Explores consensus among economists on specific propositions on the basis of a fall 2000 survey of American Economic Association members. Finds consensus generally within the profession, although the degree of consensus varies among propositions that are international, macroeconomic, and microeconomic in nature. States the profession displays…

We determine how much observed student performance in microeconomics principles can be attributed, inferentially, to three kinds of student academic "productivity," the instructor, demographics, and unmeasurables. The empirical approach utilizes an ordered probit model that relates student performance in micro to grades in prior…

The excess burden of taxation typically has two graphical representations in undergraduate microeconomics and public finance textbooks: the IC/BC (indifference curve/budget constraint) representation and the demand/supply representation. The IC/BC representation has the advantage of showing the behavioral response to a distortionary tax and how a…

In intermediate microeconomic textbooks the reciprocal nature of externalities is presented using numerical examples of costs and benefits. This treatment of the Coase theorem obscures the fact that externality costs and benefits are best understood as being on a continuum where costs vary with the degree of intensity of the externality. When…

This author delineates an alternative to traditional textbook teaching of economics: using contemporary films to bring concepts and practices to life. (Contains 5 notes.)

As professional athletes are traded from team to team, various in-kind and monetary transactions for certain jersey numbers are becoming more common. Given the size of some of the recent payments, these stories have transitioned from relative obscurity to mainstream sports news. In this article, the authors provide two areas where these kinds of…

In recent years, interest has been growing in policy applications of different auction systems. This paper reports a series of experiments that were used to design and implement an auction in a unique policymaking environment. In April 2000, the Georgia legislature passed a law that mandated that the state hold an auction in drought years to pay…

Describes bargaining examples that use expected utility theory. Provides example results that are intuitive, shown graphically and algebraically, and offer upper-level student samples that illustrate the usefulness of the expected utility theory. (JEH)

Describes and contrasts nonlinear and linear pricing in consumer choice theory. Discusses the types of nonlinear pricing: block-declining tariff, two-part tariff, three-part tariff, and quality discounts or premia. States that understanding nonlinear pricing enhances student comprehension of consumer choice theory. Suggests teaching the concept in…