Micro economic THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM参考.ppt

* * * * * * Notes and teaching tips: 5, 7, 43, and 48. To view a full-screen figure during a class, click the red “expand” button. To return to the previous slide, click the red “shrink” button. To advance to the next slide, click anywhere on the full screen figure. * * Before you jump into the demand-supply model, be sure that your students understand that a price in economics is relative price and that a relative price is an opportunity cost. Also spend some class time ensuring that they appreciate the key lessons of Chapter 2: a) Prosperity comes from specialization and exchange. b) Specialization and exchange requires the social institutions of property rights and markets. c) We must understand how markets work. You might like to explain that the most competitive markets are explicitly organized as auctions. An interesting market to describe is that at Aalsmeer in Holland, which handles a large percentage of the world’s fresh cut flowers. Roses grown in Columbia are flown to Amsterdam, auctioned at Aalsmeer, and are in vases in New York, London, and Tokyo all in less than a day. If you have an Internet connection in your classroom, you can participate in a simulation of an auction of flowers. Here is the URL (which you can also click on at the Parkin Web site)/~jb/auction/daauction.cgi. * * Estimating the demand for Coke (or bottled water) in the classroom. Of the hundreds of classroom experiments that are available today, very few are worth the time they take to conduct. The classic demand-revealing experiment is one of the most productive and worthwhile ones. Bring to class two bottles of ice-cold, ready-to-drink Coke, bottled water, or sports drink. (If your class is very large, bring six bottles). Tell the students that you have these drinks and ask them to indicate if they would like one. Most hands will go up and you are now ready to make two points: 1. The students have just revealed a want but not a demand. 2. You don’t have enough bottles to satisf