Authors of intermediate microeconomics textbooks devote relatively more space to imperfectly competitive markets than can be justified by their relative occurrence in actual markets. This gap has persisted for at least 40 years, even with an almost complete turnover of authors between the decades of the 1960s and the 2000s. This portrayal gives…

Bounded rationality is a key concept with implications across all areas of economics. To help students better understand the nature, causes and forms of bounded rationality in individual choice, the authors present a flexible classroom experiment. Beyond providing students with some first-hand evidence of bounded rationality, the experiment shows…

This study compares student perceptions, learning behaviours and success in online and face-to-face versions of a Principles of Microeconomics course. It follows a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) approach by using a cycle of empirical analysis, reflection and action to improve the learning experience for students. The online course…

As a college student, Phil Davis intended to become a scientist. But as he studied population genetics of a family of mosses, monitoring his experiments daily, he wondered, "Is this really how I want to spend my life?" After taking time off to read philosophy and bike his way around France, his answer was, "No." Instead, he decided to advance the…

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of Thistlethwaite and Campbell (1960). We organize our…

Principle of duality and numerical calculation of income and substitution effects under Hicksian Compensation are often left out of intermediate microeconomics courses because they require a rigorous calculus based analysis. But these topics are critically important for understanding consumer behavior. In this paper we use excel solver--a…

Research on the effects of grading on participation behavior is mixed. This study adds to the literature by analyzing the motivational effects of a policy that incorporates student self-assessment, flexible course weighting of the participation grade, and an expanded definition of participation. The results suggest that in some classes, more than…

A structural view of the microeconomics of education as a logically consistent whole is proposed, and research done on the subject since around 1960 is described. It is argued that the microeconomic theory of education could become an instrument for determination of appropriate forms of behavior in the classroom. (SLD)

Although thousands of students enroll in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for learning and self-improvement, many get confused, harming learning and increasing dropout rates. In this paper, we quantify these effects in two large MOOCs. We first describe how we automatically estimate students' confusion by looking at their clicking behavior on…

This article consists of more than fifty interviews with Spanish and Yucatec-Mayan men from Yucatan, Mexico, to the United States. Based on interview responses, I contend that Yucatec-Mayan immigrants support Jeffrey Cohen's (2004) "household model" and use a ch'i'ibal-centered, or family-centered, decision-making process to frame…

In this article, the authors investigate competitive firm behaviors in a two-firm environment assuming linear cost and demand functions. By introducing conjectural variations, they capture the different market structures as specific configurations of a more general model. Conjectural variations are based on the assumption that each firm believes…

The behavior of a person selecting a set of friends from a larger set of acquaintances can be analyzed as a consumer choice problem. The person can be regarded as a consumer allocating his income among a set of goods which he must purchase in quantities which will maximize his utility. An increase in utility can come either from an increase in…

This paper describes the results of a study done as part of a research program investigating the use of computer-based laboratories to support self-paced discovery learning in related to microeconomics, electricity, and light refraction. Program objectives include maximizing the laboratories' effectiveness in helping students learn content…

Examined how the price of child care affects welfare recipients' paid work behavior according to past studies. Analyzed the relationship between child care prices and hours of paid work for recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The complex nature of AFDC child care regulations is taken into account in the context of a…

Provides results of a longitudinal study tracking research behavior of a multi-college undergraduate course in microeconomics from 1996 to 2001. Student term paper bibliographies grew between 1996 and 2000 but included fewer scholarly resources. In 2001, students tended to cite scholarly sources when the professor provided clear and enforceable…