Micro economic ORGANIZING PRODUCTION参考.ppt

* * Emphasize that the TP curve graph has labor on the x-axis and output on the y- axis, while the TVC curve has output on the x-axis and total variable cost on the y-axis. So, each graph has output on one of the axes. * * * * * * * * Ronald Coase is the classic on this topic. You might like to tell your students about this remarkable person. Born in England in 1910, be graduated with a bachelor of commerce degree in 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression. While still an undergraduate, he was puzzled by the fact that he was being taught that markets coordinate economic activity, yet all around him he could see firms that were also coordinating economic activity. “Why?” he wondered. The question was especially important at that time because Socialists (and the young Coase was one of them) thought that central planning by government was superior to the market. Quoting from Coase’s autobiography, http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1991/coase-autobio.html: “I spent the academic year 1931-32 on my Cassel Travelling Scholarship in the United States studying the structure of American industries, with the aim of discovering why industries were organized in different ways. I carried out this project mainly by visiting factories and businesses. What came out of my enquiries was not a complete theory answering the questions with which I started but the introduction of a new concept into economic analysis, transaction costs, and an explanation of why there are firms. All this was achieved by the Summer of 1932, as the contents of a lecture delivered in Dundee in October 1932, make clear. These ideas became the basis for my article The Nature of the Firm, published in 1937, cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in awarding me the 1991 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.” So, this amazing scholar had done his Nobel prize winning work at the age of 22! * * * Notes and teaching tips: 5, 8, 26, 29, 33, and 57. To view a full-screen figure during a cl