Creative destruction, illustrated

Some housekeeping

Henceforth I'm changing the blog's name from "Self-Illustrated Econ Nerd" to "Economics, illustrated". I figured the blog might better serve its purpose by simply curating excellent examples of economics in action through articles, graphics, and videos.

An old archive of my Economics, Illustrated blogs can be found at http://opinionator2010.blogspot.com.

Ciao!

Oligopoly, illustrated

Signalling, illustrated

Bayesian Nash equilibria, illustrated

Via Economix:

Inside Higher Ed had a fascinating article a couple days ago about some college students who unanimously boycotted their final exam and all got A’s under a grading curve loophole. It’s a great example of game theory at work.

In several computer science courses at Johns Hopkins University, the grading curve was set by giving the highest score on the final an A, and then adjusting all lower scores accordingly. The students determined that if they collectively boycotted, then the highest score would be a zero, and so everyone would get an A. Amazingly, the students pulled it off...

This is an amazing game theory outcome, and not one that economists would likely predict.

In this one-off final exam, there are at least two Bayesian Nash equilibria (a stable outcome, where no student has an incentive to change his strategy after considering the other students’ strategies). Equilibrium #1 is that no one takes the test, and equilibrium #2 is that everyone takes the test. Both equilibria depend on what all the students believe their peers will do.

If all students believe that everyone will boycott with 100 percent certainty, then everyone should boycott (#1). But if anyone suspects that even one person will break the boycott, then at least someone will break the boycott, and everyone else will update their choices and decide to take the exam (#2).

The problem is that Nash equilibrium theory alone doesn’t tell us what the students are more likely to do. Economists would say that the first equilibrium, where no one takes the exam, is unlikely to result because it is not “trembling hand perfect,” an idea that helped win Reinhard Selten win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

The idea is to think about what would happen if one of the players believes that there’s a small probability that a mistake will occur and someone’s hand will “tremble” and play a different strategy.

The second equilibrium — the one where everyone takes the test — is trembling-hand perfect, in that if someone makes a mistake and doesn’t take the test when she means to (she sleeps through the exam, for example), everyone else continues with their strategy to keep taking the exam.

If someone makes a mistake under equilibrium #1 — in which no one takes the test — and takes the test even though he doesn’t believe others will (and knowing that it won’t improve his grade), then that equilibrium unravels and everyone decides to take the test after all.

Even more impressive to me than the students’ cooperation is the professor’s decision to honor the original grading system and give everyone an A. I guess he knew, though, that he’d made a poorly designed grading system and that the students had outsmarted it. According to Inside Higher Ed, the professor is modifying the grading scheme going forward.

“I have changed my grading scheme to include ‘everybody has 0 points means that everybody gets 0 percent,’” Professor Fröhlich told Inside Higher Ed, “and I also added a clause stating that I reserve the right to give everybody 0 percent if I get the impression that the students are trying to ‘game’ the system again.”

Creative destruction, illustrated

Via Rappler.com:

Reader's Digest is bankrupt - report

Reader’s Digest “sold more digital editions in December than we did newsstand editions,” Bloomberg quoted Reader’s Digest’s chief executive officer Robert Guth as saying. 

 Another global magazine, Newsweek, capped its 80 years in 2012 by ending its print run. It shifted to all-digital format to cater to more readers turning to online news.

Moral hazard, illustrated

Source:

Much discussion about higher education assumes that the children of wealthy parents have all the advantages, and they certainly have many. But a new study reveals an area where they may be at a disadvantage. The study found that the more money (in total and as a share of total college costs) that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.

The findings -- particularly grouped with other work by the researcher who made them -- suggest that the students least likely to excel are those who receive essentially blank checks for college expenses.

Asymmetric information, illustrated

From Gizmodo:

Doctors Don’t Follow Their Own Advice on Medical Treatment 

It's been known that doctors tend to avoid their advice for patients when it comes to treating themselves but it's pretty amazing how big the difference really is. Radiolab dug up a decade-long survey made by Joseph Gallo of John Hopkins that showed what doctors really think. 

The scenario the doctors were given was "irreversible brain injury without terminal illness". Taking a look at the survey and it's pretty, um, clear that doctors don't want any type of treatment other than pain meds.

International trade, illustrated

From Gizmodo:

The New Backbone of International Trade Is the Single Biggest Movable Thing We’ve Ever Built 

You won't have any trouble finding thisMarco Polo in the pool—even with your eyes closed. Five Airbus a380s lined up nose-to-tail still wouldn't match the length, much less the overwhelming mass, of the world's largest container ship. 

The CMA CGM Marco Polo is the largest container ship ever constructed, capable of transporting 16,020 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit, the standard of international shipping containers) of cargo—820 more the Emma Maersk's previous record and a tenfold capacity increase from the 1980s. At 1300 feet long and 178 feet wide with a 52 foot draft and 187,625 dead weight tonnage, it's also the largest human construct to ever move across the planet's surface. It's larger than both the Queen Mary 2 and the Charles de Gaulle, even America'sNimitz-Class super carriers. Slap the Empire State building and the Eiffel Tower together—this ship is still bigger. 

Built by South Korea's DSME (Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering) and operated by CMA CGM, a French shipping company, the Marco Polo entered service in November of last year. It transports goods along the French Asia Line (FAL1), an international shipping route that runs from Shanghai, through the Mediterranean, and up the coast of Western Europe to Hamburg.

Giffen goods, illustrated

The first real-world evidence, according to the authors (pdf).

This paper provides the first real-world evidence of Giffen behavior, i.e., upward sloping demand. Subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of China, we find strong evidence of Giffen behavior for rice in Hunan, and weaker evidence for wheat in Gansu. The data provide new insight into the consumption behavior of the poor, who act as though maximizing utility subject to subsistence concerns. We find that their elasticity of demand depends significantly, and nonlinearly, on the severity of their poverty. Understanding this heterogeneity is important for the effective design of welfare programs for the poor.