Chapter 10: Pure Competition

William Lazonick, a director at University of Massachusetts writes an article for The Huffington Post and points out all of the flaws that comes with perfect competition. He acknowledges all the issues that textbooks aren't teaching college kids when it comes to it. I really like this article because it provides an outside opinion of what someone thinks about perfect competition and what he believes needs to be improved. Link below: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-lazonick/whats-perfect-about-perfe_b_945519.html

Chapter 6: Elasticity

In this article by Catherine Merlo titled "Why Dairy Demand Has Become More Elastic" who is an editor for Ag Web describes the issues that diary prices are having on demand. Over the years dairy was always stable when it came to prices but since the past years prices have been increasing causing the demand for dairy to become more and more elastic. 

After reading this article I realize now how much economics is associated with our lives everyday. Normal things that you do not think about is impacted by economics and economic decisions. Link Below: 

http://www.agweb.com/article/why-dairy-demand-has-become-more-elastic-naa-catherine-merlo/

Chapter 10: Pure Competition

Elaine Schwartz who writes for Econlife points out that consumers are drinking less and less milk over the years and that pure competition is to blame. Even though she agrees that we are drinking the same amount compared to previous years, our beverage options have increased compared to our parents and grandparents. She explains that pure competition is the reason why juice and soda are in, and milk is out. Link Below:

http://econlife.com/2014/06/milk-perfect-competition-limits-firms/

Chapter 12: Pure Monopoly

Another article that caught my eye about monopolies was by Noah Smith from Bloomberg View titled "Monopoly is NOT a game". In this article he addresses the issues that come with monopolies and why he does not agree with them. His reasoning for his lack of support toward monopolies is that they are allowed to charge too much money for a product. He also addresses what the government needs to be skeptical about with monopolies increasing. Link below:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-07/monopolies-are-no-fun-and-games-for-the-u-s-economy

Chapter 12: Pure Monopoly

This article from New York Times by Dean Baker shares an important message when it comes to monopolies on drugs. In this he sympathizes with the families who are struggling with paying for overly priced medicine. I agree with Dean that just like other countries, there should be a price control and monopolies should not be allowed to take advantage of families by doubling their prices. What are your thoughts? Link below: 

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/09/23/should-the-government-impose-drug-price-controls/end-patent-monopolies-on-drugs

Chapter 6: Elasticity of Demand

I found this really interesting article from Forbes by Patrick Rishe who talks about the Super Bowl in 2013 and how their ticket prices that year almost doubled compared to previous years. In this article he mentions the elasticity of demand and how most times ticket prices are fairly cheap to make sure that seats are filled with fans. This article really caught my eye cause I never compared elasticity of demand with ticket prices to sports games. If you want to read about it the link is below! 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/prishe/2013/09/19/super-bowl-xlviii-pricing-a-lesson-in-demand-elasticity/#190f28d26b23

I also found this really funny music video about the elasticity of demand and this is the link to that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNN3l-v5Tnk

Chapter 13

Monopolistic competition is like pure competition because suppliers try to accomplish price advantages by separating their products from other similar products. An example would be beauty products, there are tons of different products.

Chapter 6

Now Apple IPhone's are a different story because people pay a lot of money for new IPhone's every year. If Apple were to raise their prices, people would still be willing to pay the price to an extent unlike if it was a less well known brand like a Samsung phone. This demonstrates price elastic.

Chapter 6

Price inelastic- a change in price causes a smaller % change in demand.
Price elastic- a change in price causes a bigger % change in demand.
Cigarettes are perfect showing price inelastic because if government were to increase taxes on cigarettes and the price of tobacco would rise, the demand would still inelastic because smokers are addicted and there would be no alternatives to buy.

Chapter 5

Government failure occurs when there are inefficiencies in resource allocation caused by problems in the operation of the government. This can occur when politicians have poor information about a type of service to provide. Like Hillary Clinton on Law and Order in this country, her ideology on this matter is what got her less votes in the election.

Chapter 3, Producer expectations

Producer expectations about the future have affected a producers willingness to supply that product, according to the text. An example of this would be farmers anticipating a higher price of wheat in the future. So they withhold the selling of wheat now, and this causes a decrease in the selling of wheat in the market.
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Chapter 3, Technology

Looking back on my major, I would have liked to have changed it to engineering or something to do with technology. Over the last decade, technology has take over the world. Jobs are more scarce, because why would you pay someone to do a job when you could have a machine do it for free. For example, a lot of farmers have lost jobs due to the increasing amount of machines. Also laborers have  lost jobs as well if there work in the field of producing foods, because machines have taken over.
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Chapter 4, Private goods

When dealing with private goods, we have to understand that they are distinguished by rivalry and excludability. Meaning, the difference between a private good and a public good are things you buy on an everyday basis (public good) or more luxury appliances like personal computers, cars, and sporting goods. I went online to order clothes the other day and everything online is meant for personal orders, vs going into a Hyvee and buying a gallon of milk or a can of soup which is meant for more public use.
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Chapter 4, Consumer Surplus

According to the textbook, the benefit surplus received by a consumer or consumers in a market is called a consumer surplus. When I went shopping for my laptop, I went with an apple macbook pro. The end price was $1,200. So this was the maximum price I was willing to pay for a laptop because it had all of the essentials I needed for it. Other options included and HP, which was more expensive and had the same benefits. In the end, the maximum price that a person is willing to pay for a unit (my laptop) depends on the opportunity cost of the consumptions alternatives.
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Demanding Resources 2

So technology is taking over the world as we know it. Everything is changing to some sort of new technology. This means that there will be a huge demand of technology workers. We have already seen this in action starting recently. Companies are now in demand of IT workers to help run their business since it is all technology based. This demand is only going to continue to grow because we are getting smarter and creating new ways perform tasks using technology. So if I were to redo my college experience I would enter a technology major such as computer network security or something along those lines. 

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Demanding Resources

Loving music I am always interested in how to run an event and what not. So think of the demand for resources brings me to this past summer setting up for a concert for A-trak. We needed to figure out how many beer tents needed for his concert area. We needed to know exactly what he wanted personally. Also we needed to know about security and medical attention. These are all essential resources for running this event. Without these resources the event would not be able to be in effect because of the codes we would not be following. Also the fans coming to the event would not be enjoying themselves without their demands products we gave them. 

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Pure Monopoly 2

Since now there are no real pure monopolies really in the world I will talk about what I believe is the closest thing to one. So the company I worked for the past two summers runs sports leagues for adults. Our beach volleyball leagues have taken over the Chicago land area. We are the largest and have consuming the smaller companies and having them become part of our company. We do no solely control the beach but we made it so now there are really only two companies doing what we do and we double them in size. This is something I thought would be a good example to a modern day pure monopoly. 

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Pure Monopoly

Uber here in the quad cities has basically come as close as you can to a modern day monopoly. When I first got to St. Ambrose there was a way of transportation to and from downtown for students called the boom boom bus. Then two years ago when uber came to the area and completely pushed the boom boom bus out of service. The bus couldn’t compete with the service uber was providing. Uber cut the costs down from 5 dollars for a two way ticket to 6 dollars for a whole car full of people to make it there and back.

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Long run 2

So back in high school I played club volleyball and the club I played for only had one small facility. We were never able to host tournaments of our own so the only income the club made was from having kids join teams. This is ok but you will not make as much as those who have a facility able to host tournaments. This is what the club I used to play for did since I left. They purchased a second location. This location larger and allows them to run at a larger scale. This is equivalent to a firm purchasing a larger factory to produce at a larger scale.

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Long run

Playing volleyball at St. Ambrose has been part of my life for the past four years. When I first started the NAIA was half the size it was today. Only about 20 teams were in the NAIA for volleyball.  Schools are now starting programs and entering the NAIA. The schools are the firms entering an industry which would be the NAIA. This is showing how industries grow as firms enter in the long-run. The NAIA wants to expand as well so there are no real challenging barriers to entry in this case. The NAIA has double in size since I first started playing volleyball four years ago. 

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Short run 2

A friend of mine is in a band and they tell me stories about when they went on tour. At the beginning when they were not big they had to pay for recording time and studio time and then they still had travel costs and food costs they had to pay for. They told me multiple tours at first they were not making any profits. But considering that they did not have any other way of making some sort of income they said they had to keep going on tour even though it was costing them money at times. This I felt was a great example of the short-run. 

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Short Run

A story I have for this is when I went to Florida over the summer a couple years ago. When we were there my brother and I wanted to do some fishing. We needed to buy a lot equipment if we wanted to fish. Only being there for a week I told my brother that we didn’t need anything special just let’s stay on the cheaper side for the equipment. He didn’t understand why so I told him that it would not be worth paying for all of this expensive equipment when we are leaving and cannot take it with use back home. The cheaper equipment would allow us to fish and not waste money. 

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Cost of Production 2

A friend of mine runs a club volleyball program here in Davenport. He recently purchased the use of a facility. Before he had to share courts with another club and that was not ideal. With this purchase he told me why it is so important. Now they can host tournament and start trying to make profits. The tournaments have a lot of running parts as well. They need to make sure the equipment is up to date. As well as medical staff is at the event. So to produce a tournament the costs add up quickly because you need a location, equipment and staffing to cover all codes. 

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Cost of Production

Whenever I think of cost of production I always think back to my roommate’s business. My roommate owns a shaved ice business and I always wondered how much went into making one snow cone. I always figured it was just the cone and the ice. But he told me it was much more than that. There is the use of the machine, the labor, flavors, and the store front cost goes into it and finally the cone and ice. This came to a surprise to me and made me understand the pricing of his product at his storefronts he has. 

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Externalities

Growing up with an older brother ones actions affected the other a lot. So having a competitive older brother he always wanted to be better than me at everything. In his effort to do so he would push me as well. So when I was learning to ride a bike he took it on himself to teach me. Failed try after failed try he was getting upset. Finally he decided to give me a push from behind but that didn’t work so he decided to shove as hard as he could and I went flying over the handle bars smashing my face and knocking out five teeth. This I feel is a small and easy example because his actions effected my well being. 

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Public Goods

So public goods first off are and goods open to the public for purchase. So when I think of that I always start off thinking of class when we talked about light houses and how they are a public good because anyone can go in them. I think back to when I was younger at a friend’s lake house and there was a lighthouse on the lake. We used to go and hangout up there all the time. At the time I never thought of it as a public good but just as an open place to hang out. 

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Oligopolies as a BEE

With St. Ambrose being such a small school we as students are limited with professors that teach certain courses. For example, there are only two professors who generally teach economics. This can be good or bad. Good because it allows for a better student/professor relationship, however, it can be bad for students because a student may not like the way a certain professor presents material in the classroom lectures. https://www.facebook.com/PrinciplesOfMicroDrBang/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf

Public Goods

When thinking of public goods, I think of products or goods that can be bought and bought and will always be available for other consumers. I work at Dick's Sporting Good's and an example of this would be golf balls. We have an over abundance of golf balls and even if we were to sell out, they are still available online and through our warehouses because they are constantly being produced. https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=econ202drbang

Foreign Exchange Market

For my international marketing course, I had to write a report about the business culture in France. While discussing the currency exchanges between the US and France, I started to see how the Foreign Exchange Market could possibly be an example of pure competition in the short run.  For example, currency is homogenous— a dollar is a dollar and a euro is a euro no matter where it is traded. It’s also traded for its relative value. There are also many buyers and sellers (no barriers) so that no one person can influence the market, making them a price taker.

Drug Patent Expiration Means Profit Is Up For Grabs

I was reading an article about expiring drug patents and learned that when a company or a doctor has a patent on a drug, they have a monopoly on the drug until the patent runs out. And once it runs out, competition rushes in to fill the market with firms selling the drug under their own name. In other words, they create their very own generic drug, which is set at a lower price to undercut the original drug maker. You can see this occurring at walgreens, where next to the name brand items, you find the walgreens generic product at a cheaper price.

http://marketrealist.com/2016/03/drug-patent-expirations-190-billion-sales-grabs/

Pepperjacks closing permanently, Entry & Exit

There is a location that has changed hands several times in the last few years. Each time, a casual sit-down restaurant was bought out by yet another casual sit-down restaurant. None of them lasted very long and I deduced the reason being that the market for this line of restaurants was completely saturated in the area, and these restaurants that were trying to open up (next to an outback mind you) had nothing special to offer the public to make them stand out from the competition. An example of “entry eliminates economic profits,” and “exit eliminates losses.”

http://qctimes.com/news/local/pepperjack-s-closing-permanent/article_87f4556b-c61a-5e3b-8eea-9821152adda1.html

Supply and Demand for the Holidays

Say there's a hot new toy on the market and demand for it is very high. As the holidays get closer, the consumer will be more willing to purchase these items at a higher cost. Assuming supply will go down due to the high demand, the supply curve will shift to the left. This is will drive the equilibrium price up and the quantity supplied will be driven down.

Utility at the Grocery store

Say I went grocery shopping and I was trying to decide between buying apples and oranges. The apples are what I prefer but they're also more expensive. I would still buy apples because it maximizes the amount of utility per dollar spent. If the price of oranges are cheaper and knowing the amount of utility would be less from the orange then you might be more inclined to get oranges over apples.

Chapter 10: Purely Competitive Corn Market

Earlier, I was admiring a framed portrait of my grandparents’ farm. I realized that the market for the corn they produce would be an example of pure competition. This is because there are a large number of other farms that are producing basically an identical product; there is virtually no difference between the corn that each farm is producing. One downside to this is that it makes these corn farmers price takers, meaning they cannot change the market price, they can only adjust to it. However, it is easy for corn farmers to enter and exit this purely competitive market.