T-Shirts and consumer choice
Firstly, I hope the first AS exam went well, whether that was macro (OCR), micro, and whether for the first time or a retake. I also hope that in amongst the revision you’re in the market for a more random blogpost…
This one’s a topic on which Paul Ormerod would have something to say. On NPR’s Planet Money radio show/podcast, they’re launching a T-shirt, and using this as a stimulus for a whole set of reporting on its genesis, from cotton subsidies to its design. The latest podcast investigated the colour of their T-shirts. “What’s the economics in that?”, I hear you cry…
Unit 1 Micro: Selection of Revision Presentations
Here are some streamed revision presentations for unit 1 microeconomics
read more...»Revision Quiz: AS Economics: Price Elasticity of Demand (1)
The basics of price elasticity of demand are covered in this revision quiz.
Launch: Revision Quiz: AS Economics: Price Elasticity of Demand (1)
Revision Quiz: AS Economics: Supply & Demand (1)
10 revision questions here (MCQs) on the basics of supply and demand.
Launch Revision Quiz: AS Economics: Supply & Demand (1)
Unit 1 Micro: Evaluating Government Intervention - Alcohol Pricing
AS Micro students will be gearing themselves up for a key period of intensive revision over the coming days and weeks. For most, being able to analyse and evaluate government intervention in markets is crucial to scoring well in exam questions and reaching those top grades.
Evaluation is not a skill that can be learnt overnight. It requires plenty of attempts to get the evaluative style and approach working well.
BTW, if you are revising market failure I highly recommend Matt Smith's Scoop.It Board - full of great applied examples on this big area for the Unit 1 economics exam! Click here to view it read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Taxing Calories in Soft Drinks
A tax on the calories contained in soft drinks is around 6% more effective at reducing obesity than a general tax on soft drinks – but the effect is only a drop in people’s weight of around 1.6 pounds per year. These are the findings of research by Wei Xiao, to be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2013 annual conference.
The study analyses the buying patterns of 10,000 American households by looking at data on soft drink purchases from supermarket scanners. Based on the calorie content of soft drinks and the medically accepted view that an intake of 6.614 calories leads to a gain in weight of 1 gram, the author simulates the effectiveness of various soft drink tax policies on people’s weight.
The research suggests that a tax that targets the calorie content will be more effective than a universal tax on soft drinks – as some soft drinks are healthier than others. But the author admits that ‘although an obesity tax on soft drinks can cause weight reduction, the effect is small’, adding that even without any dietary changes, ‘a human’s weight can change in the region of one pound in a day’.
Unit 1 Micro: Falling Car Use among Younger Drivers
The number of young people taking driving tests in UK has dropped a fifth in the past five years - that is a reduction of over 200,000 people having lessons and then taking their driving exam. According to data from the RAC there are significantly fewer young men with a driving licence today, down 14% compared with mid-1990s. What factors might explain the decline in demand for car use among this age group?
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: E-Bikes on Track for Surge in Demand
Cycling is a boom sport at the moment. The numbers of people active in on-road and off-road cycling continues to grow and sales of products such as turbo trainers that allow enthusiasts to train at home when the weather is inclement are also moving into a higher gear.
Here is a story of innovation, German manufacturing excellence, joint ventures and the commercial returns from people's desire to become more active. Electric-powered bicycles (e-bikes) are being built with the help of the multinational firm Daimler Benz. The bikes, which cost as much as $5,000, only help cyclists pedal if they want them to, but their motors can also effortlessly push up drivers to 45 kilo-metres per hour. A luxury product for now, but as economies of scale take effect, prices will fall and the product will become more affordable.
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: Why Lego is so popular and profitable
I really look forward to receiving my daily email from the Farnham Street Blog - over the last couple of years it has been a continuous stream of interesting ideas and links to thinking in business and behavioural economics. Today's article focused on the continued popularity of Lego bricks despite the loss of patents. Price anchoring, brilliant marketing, consumer perception, hard wiring into our brains the contextual value of a product ... the result is low price elasticity and the ability to raise price nearly every year! Here is the link
Paul Ormerod: Meat and potato pies and the Nobel Prize in economics
Tragedy struck at a mid-week game played during the holiday
season in Football League Division Two. The pies ran out in the home supporters’ bar. The incident may seem trivial to
those not involved. Yet it
illustrates some important themes in economics, which have even gained their
inventors the Nobel Prize.
Unit 1 Micro: Key Term Glossary - Markets and Market Failure
An updated glossary of key terms for the Unit 1 Economics paper
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Markets and Market Failure Concept Glossary
An A-Z glossary for the Unit 1 Micro course
read more...»Chocolate Passion - Grown in St Lucia, Made in Cambridge
Angus Thirwell the co-founder and CEO of Hotel Chocolat is immensely grateful to Joanne Harris and Juliet Binoche. respectively the author and star of the hit film Hotel Chocolat. The movie educated a generation of aspirational chocolate lovers in how to pronounce Hotel Chocolat and has helped millions of consumers in Britain and around the world advocate the hit chocolate retail brand without committing a pronunication faux-pas! I wonder how many satisfied customers realise that Hotel Chocolat does not exist? Perhaps they have typed the name into Trip Advisor hoping for a review of a retreat flowing with rather wonderful chocolate made from a St Lucian plantation?
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Making the Bus Cool!
The conventional wisdom is that bus transport in many countries including the UK is an inferior good - demand declines as real incomes fall. Consumer perceptions of bus travel are hard to shift and default choices when it comes to transport are often deep-rooted and tough to change. The total annual number of bus journeys made in the UK experienced a long term decline from the 1950s for nearly forty years although a recent House of Common select Committee report found that, since the mid-1990s, there has been an upturn in total passenger numbers for Great Britain, largely as a result of the introduction of national concessionary travel schemes and passenger growth in London.
Perhaps this rather wonderful video from Denmark does more than most to make bus travel cool once again! What do you think?
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: The Rise of Dynamic Ticket Pricing in Sport
Here is the link to the article
The Kindle and the e-book - the perfect complements
I am a Kindle user.
There, I’ve said it. As the founder member of the Kindle-owners self-help group (KOSH), I’m inviting all fellow addicts to come out and admit likewise – until you admit it to yourself no-one will be able to help you. Until we act collectively, no-one will be able to stop those Amazon dealers from peddling their wares.
read more...»Paul Ormerod: Ninja Turtles, Nick Clegg and Market Failure
Christmas is coming. Retailers are beginning to push their offers hard. The first page of a search on Google for ‘Christmas Toys 2012’ is full of sites announcing the ones which will be ‘hot’ or ‘top’. In total, there are over 75 million results available to be perused.
Last year it was Mishling Tree Monsters, Doggie Doo, and the like which proved the most popular. Readers of a certain age will recall such stupendous commercial triumphs as Teletubbies, Buzz Lightyear and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Fond though these memories might be, the runaway successes bring tears as well as joy. Every year, the cult toys of the year become hard, or even impossible, to acquire as the great day approaches.
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Smartphone Penetration and Creative Destruction
The speed with which new consumer product technologies are taken up is
of enormous interest for lots of reasons. Emerging products and services
challenge demand, revenues and profits for established products and
bring about - as Schumpeter pointed out - gales of creative
destruction.
In the United States, fresh data suggests that more
than half of US consumers have smartphones and if the information is
accurate, this means that smartphones have become one of the most
rapidly adopted consumer technologies of all time.
Unit 1 Micro: Capacity problems following Olympic surge in demand
A hat tip to Ed Marsh from Glyn School for spotting this excellent short news video from BBC Midlands. Demand for swimming lessons in Corby and Northampton is running well ahead of the capacity of the pools to offer them - the problem is not a lack of pool capacity, more a shortage of qualified swimming coaches - what are they doing to rectify this?
Unit 1 Micro: Prices in Action - Ticket Pricing at Derby County
A warm hat tip to Ed Marsh, Head of Economics at Glyn School for spotting this superb example of a sports club using dynamic pricing technology to determine the prices of tickets for their home games.
The BBC news site reports that Derby County are introducing "demand-based" ticketing for the coming season with prices fluctuating according to the opposition, the team's form, kick-off times and even the weather. The system is known as Sports and Entertainment Analytical Ticketing System (SEATS)
Buy in advance and fans will get cheaper prices - but what if a sizeable group decides to start a game of chicken with the club and hold back from buying? As match day gets closer, ticket prices should move higher, but if demand for a game is well below the stadium's capacity will prices drop back?
Hardened cynics might also point out that the Derby County ground has a fundamental design flaw .... the seats face the pitch!
Unit 1 Micro: Difficult Times for UK Farmers
Unit 1 Micro: What future for the skateboard industry?
Admit it, when was the last time you dusted off your skateboard and strolled over to the local skate park? The estimated number of global skateboard participants has fallen by a third in the last ten years and the industry faces big challenges in preventing decline and reinvigorating what once was a craze but now a market with a firmly downward sloping trajectory for sales. Should skateboard manufacturers stick to their core demographic or look for new alliances to change perceptions and - ultimately - sales and profits. This Financial Times video provides some interesting analysis and comment.
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Falling demand prompts Lexmark to exit inkjet market
I have always thought that ink jet printers were an expensive and inefficient luxury - the high cost of consumables has always been a source of frustration and annoyance.
It seems now that the demand for ink jets is on a steep downward path as cheaper and frankly better substitutes are chosen. Far fewer people are printing out their photos and choose instead to post onto social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. For those who prefer a hard copy of a photo, laser printers have become a much more cost effective and affordable alternative to ink jet printers.
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Drought and US Corn Prices
This news video from the Economist looks at the impact of the severe drought affecting commercial corn farmers in the United States this year, the drought that plagues most of America has left acres of little more than dry, burnt stalks. July 2012 was hottest US month since records began and the latest forecast is the smallest corn yields for over six years. How will this affect market supply and corn prices in the United States? Which industries rely on corn as a key raw material? How will consumers in the UK be affected?
Remember that the United States is the world’s largest exporter of corn, soybeans and wheat. Ethanol production accounts for about 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop.
More reading here: CNN news: The global impact of the U.S. drought
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: The Price of a Pizza in Brazil
Have a guess at the price tag (measured in US dollars) of a large margarita pizza in the comfortable middle-class environment of San Paulo in Brazil? Would you expect it to be less or more expensive than say a home delivered pizza to your house from leading UK business Dominos?
Environmental Economics: Water Scarcity
By 2050, the world’s growing population will use 55% more water in their homes, to grow food, and to produce electricity and manufactured goods. To ensure enough water to meet this demand, we will need to stop wasting it and find new ways to make sure there’s enough to go around.
The world’s demand for water will continue to grow in the years ahead because of a rising global population and changing lifetsyles and wealth. More people using more and increasingly polluted water represents one of the most severe environmental, economic and humanitarian challenges facing the world. Here are some video resources on the issue of water scarcity.
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Welsh Plastic Bag Charge Reduces Demand
A tax on plastic bags in Wales has seen the number given away drop by sizeable amounts according to this news report Since 1 October 2011, there has been a minimum charge of 5p on all single use carrier bags.
The Welsh government acted in a bid to encourage re-use of bags and therefore lower demand for single-use free bags. The justification was on economic and environmental grounds:
read more...»
Unit 1 Micro: Poor Summer Weather and Market Demand
The poor summer weather has hit many businesses across the UK and the flash flooding has caused havoc for many communities. This BBC news video looks at some of the businesses damaged by the heavy rain. But can you think of businesses that will have benefitted from the deluge?
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Revision Presentation on the Price Mechanism
Here is a slide share presentation on the price mechanism in action focused in students taking their AS microeconomics papers.
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Income Elasticity of Demand
A revision blog on income elasticity of demand
read more...»
