322 Matching Annotations
1. Jan 2020
2. pubs.aeaweb.org pubs.aeaweb.org
1. Picking the prediction func-tion then involves two steps: The first step is, conditional on a level of complexity, to pick the best in-sample loss-minimizing function.8 The second step is to estimate the optimal level of complexity using empirical tuning (as we saw in cross-validating the depth of the tree).

ML explained while standing on one leg.

2. egularization combines with the observability of predic-tion quality to allow us to fit flexible functional forms and still find generalizable structure.

But we can't really make statistical inferences about the structure, can we?

3. This procedure works because prediction quality is observable: both predic-tions y ˆ and outcomes y are observed. Contrast this with parameter estimation, where typically we must rely on assumptions about the data-generating process to ensure consistency.

I'm not clear what the implication they are making here is. Does it in some sense 'not work' with respect to parameter estimation?

4. In empirical tuning, we create an out-of-sample experiment inside the original sample.

remember that tuning is done within the training sample

5. Performance of Different Algorithms in Predicting House Values

Any reason they didn't try a Ridge or an Elastic net model here? My instinct is that these will beat LASSO for most Economic applications.

6. We consider 10,000 randomly selected owner-occupied units from the 2011 metropolitan sample of the American Housing Survey. In addition to the values of each unit, we also include 150 variables that contain information about the unit and its location, such as the number of rooms, the base area, and the census region within the United States. To compare different prediction tech-niques, we evaluate how well each approach predicts (log) unit value on a separate hold-out set of 41,808 units from the same sample. All details on the sample and our empirical exercise can be found in an online appendix available with this paper athttp://e-jep.org

Seems a useful example for trying/testing/benchmarking. But the link didn't work for me. Can anyone find it? Is it interactive? (This is why I think papers should be html and not pdfs...)

7. Making sense of complex data such as images and text often involves a prediction pre-processing step.

In using 'new kinds of data' in Economics we often need to do a 'classification step' first

8. The fundamental insight behind these breakthroughs is as much statis-tical as computational. Machine intelligence became possible once researchers stopped approaching intelligence tasks procedurally and began tackling them empirically.

I hadn't thought about how this unites the 'statistics to learn stuff' part of ML and the 'build a tool to do a task' part. Well-phrased.

9. Why not also use it to learn something about the “underlying model”: specifically, why not use it to make infer-ences about the underlying data-generating process?

(they give reasons why not)

10. Economic theory and content expertise play a crucial role in guiding where the algorithm looks for structure first. This is the sense in which “simply throw it all in” is an unreasonable way to understand or run these machine learning algo-rithms.

At least we (Economists) hope this is the case ... motivated reasoning?

11. available finite-sample guidance on its implementation—such as heuristics for the number of folds (usually five to ten) or the “one standard-error rule” for tuning the LASSO (Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman 2009)—has a more ad-hoc flavor.

It sounds like there are big unknowns... a lot is still 'rules of thumb'

12. Should out-of-sample performance be estimated using some known correction for overfitting (such as an adjusted R2 when it is available) or using cross-validation?

Do people use $$R^2_{adj}$$ for this? Would that fit under 'machine learning'?

13. Kernel regressionKernel bandwidth

hadn't realised kernel can be done in the ML framework

14. final category is in direct policy applications. Deciding which teacher to hire implicitly involves a prediction task (what added value will a given teacher have?), one that is intimately tied to the causal question of the value of an additional teacher.

Academic Economists: this is usually the 'we also can do this' part of a paper rather than it's core, no?

15. In another category of applications, the key object of interest is actually a parameter β, but the inference procedures (often implicitly) contain a prediction task. For example, the first stage of a linear instrumental variables regres-sion is effectively prediction. The same is true when estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, testing for effects on multiple outcomes in experiments, and flexibly controlling for observed confounders.

This is most relevant tool for me. Before I learned about ML I often thought about using 'stepwise selection' for such tasks... to find the best set of 'control variables' etc. But without regularisation this seemed problematic.

16. Machine Learning: An Applied Econometric Approach

Shall we use Hypothesis to have a discussion ?

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3. 80000hours.org 80000hours.org
1. David Chalmers: I think I may have introduced this actually years ago. I call it “The law of minimization of mystery”. I was making fun of some people who wanted to tie consciousness and quantum mechanics. But I do think there are interesting potential links between the two. I mean. The problem in quantum mechanics is not just that it’s mysterious.It’s a very specific problem. How do the standard dynamics of quantum mechanics which has these two processes: Schrodinger evolution and wave function collapse. Mostly the wave function evolves this way, except on certain times, when you make a measurement, the wave function changes in this special way, and that’s totally standard quantum mechanics.

Some great points here.

He is saying something like "consciousness collapses the quantum wave function"

Bundling quantum mechanics and consciousness together… “The law of minimisation of mysteries” (a sarcastic point).

“maybe these two weird things are just one weird thing”

But it seems natural because there is this mysterious. Process, collapse of a wave function, that happens on measurement and what is measurement but conscious observation?

2. I’ve argued you need something new in the story and the kind of view I’ve been drawn towards are views that take consciousness as something sort of fundamental and irreducible in our picture of the natural world in the same way that we take space and time and mass and charge as fundamental. We’re used to the idea that some things are fundamental. If you can’t explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of your old laws, your old properties and laws, spacetime, mass, Newtonian dynamics, you bring in something else. Electric charge, Maxwell’s laws.Likewise, I think for consciousness. So I’ve been drawn towards views that take consciousness as fundamental and what that comes to in practice in philosophy is either you’ve got the choice between either a dualist view where you’ve got. You’ve got the physical world, which is one thing, and then you’ve got say the mind, you’ve got consciousness, which is another thing.They’re both fundamental properties distinct from each other. And then there are laws that connect them. That’s one view. And the other view is panpsychism, which says consciousness is somehow present at the very basis of the physical world and maybe the physics that we know and love basically somehow fundamentally involves consciousness somehow.

Should we consider consciousness as a fundamental of the universe like space-time mass and magnetism? I.e., Irreducible.

This leads to dualism and panpsychism. The latter apparently asserts that there is some element of consciousness that is part of the equation and physical processes and maybe its present everywhere.

3. think the most interesting of which is that this whole idea of consciousness is an illusion. A pathology built up by our cognitive systems to believe we have these special properties of consciousness introspectively, even though we don’t.

"Illusionism" (1.21:15) There is an argument that our brain and the physical processes trick us into thinking we have the special properties of consciousness.

I don’t understand this argument, if we don’t have consciousness then who is in there that can be tricked?

4. David Chalmers: Yeah, but I also think there are these sociological effects where most people think… we got this on the PhilPapers survey that most people think that most people think a certain thing, even though most people think the opposite.

Inconsistency between first and second orderly beliefs among philosophers... in the survey there are many cases where people think everyone thinks A when actually most people think B.

5. I’m sure that many of them are among listeners potentially. It seems like there’s a bit of a stream of this among rationalists and I often find natural scientists, I just can’t get them to accept that there’s like anything strange about consciousness existing.

people who deny that there is anything puzzling or special about consciousness. ... These people are just being JERKS.

6. David Chalmers: Well, the big obvious thing that can be said in defense of philosophy here is the thing that I said already. Which is philosophy by its nature is the field where there’s disagreement, because once we obtain methods for producing an agreement on questions and reasonably decisive ways, we spin it off and it’s no longer philosophy.So from that perspective, philosophy has been this incredibly effective incubator of disciplines. Physics span out of philosophy. Psychology span out of philosophy. Arguably to some extent, economics and linguistics span out of philosophy. So what usually happens is not that we entirely solve a whole of a philosophical problem, but we come up with some methods of say, making progress experimentally or formally on a certain subquestion or aspects of that question and then that gets spun off. The part that we haven’t figured out how to think about well enough that remains philosophy.

I hadn't appreciated this point before

7. the highest correlation coefficient in this survey was 0.56 which is kind of only moderate and it was between moral realism and cognitivism which obviously have a lot to do with one another directly

what were the other typical correlations?

8. Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I guess in politics it seems that that brings out people’s tribal instincts, so they tend to group together for practical reasons, if not intellectual reasons, like kind of all sharing the same views or like wanting to fall into line and are particularly incentivized to do that. An interesting thing, I’ll provide a link to a study looking at how ideologically tightly grouped are people in politics, which found that uneducated people just like have views all over the place. Their views on one question don’t really predict their views on another.

The Ezra Klein take on Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe’s "Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. "?

So are you saying that you think political people group together more in politics than philosophers do in philosophy? Hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, of course, as most people don't think deeply about these philosophical questions.

9. David Chalmers: I don’t know. Where I come from, 0.56 is a pretty high correlation coefficient. So I don’t know. Maybe it depends on the area.

seems high to me also

10. And I think at that point, wherein something like in a verbal dispute, which can happen in these cases where you have different people mean different things by free will and well, I think that diagnosis is more apt for some of these questions than for others, but like this is the case again where your average philosopher uses free will, well the thing tied to moral responsibility. Many people outside philosophy may still think, ah, why use free will for that? I want to use free will for this other thing. This ability to fundamentally go against the laws of nature. And then we just have a difference about which one is worth caring about.

# Free will cop-out

They get into the discussion of free will and they answer the question they think is easy -- moral responsibility is compatible with a lack of free-will (they say, they never presented the complete argument).

This feels like somewhat of a cop-out, akin to a political spokesperson answering the question they wanted to answer and not the one you asked. (And then claiming they answered your question).

Free will ... People aren't primarily interested in it for the 'moral responsibility' question.

I want to know if I have free will to know if I'm in control, to know if anything I do matters or if I'm just an automaton/robot.

11. Now someone interested in free will could say, well, that wasn’t what I cared about (moral responsibility).

I'm that guy. I'm saying exactly this.

12. What is it like to be you right now? You’re seeing this text on the screen, you smell the coffee next to you, feel the warmth of the cup, and hear your housemates arguing about whether Home Alone was better than Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experiences

First of all, this is a great podcast and a great episode. Lots of great exchanges. This actually 'adds value' (cringey term, sorry) in terms of your understanding of those topics that come up in deeper-than-deep late-night wistful hours conversations. If you are interested in what it means to live you should listen to this episode. Don't waste your life not listening to this episode.

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4. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Also see slides 1-7 of the powerpoint HERE

Sorry, I forgot the link: HERE it is

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5. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Update: Free online access to this text may be available through your university/library (this works at Exeter) via www.vlebooks.com

I think you need to sign in via Shibboleth

2. 1.2 Readings and resources

Note that for 2019 The NS is the main one referred to!

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6. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. . (2018: but this won’t be focal on the exam.)

2019-20: this may come up. Please read into it to get the basic ideas.

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7. scunning.com scunning.com
1. Anyone else on hypothesis that can see this? Would be nice to use this to start a conversation.

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8. academic.oup.com academic.oup.com
1. Losing face PDF

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9. academic.oup.com academic.oup.com
1. Losing face

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10. Dec 2019
11. 80000hours.org 80000hours.org
1. David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness

Anyone here? I'll add my notes, wonder what others think.

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12. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Prior exams with answers and ‘mock exams’

See tips on how to answer and mark breakdowns in the student forum, responding here: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/mod/forum/post.php?edit=383503

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13. www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
1. Bee2024 finishing insurance problem from sixth problem set

May be helpful in revising

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14. www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
1. Shorter 'rooftop' video going through 3 cases of 'two-person Public goods' via powerpoint

may prove useful in revising

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15. www.khanacademy.org www.khanacademy.org
1. Power rule

I will give you the formula for the power rule on an exam, but it wouldn't hurt to practice it!

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16. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Asymmetric information (Moral hazard, adverse selection, signaling) Separate notes/handouts, to be integrated in Readings tbd Behavioural economics – first lecture (limits to cognition, willpower, self-interest), second lecture (applications) [11] NS: Ch 17, plus supplements T1:11 Further readings tbd Eighth problem set: Behavioural economics Overall each reading is optional, but to do well on the exam you need to do at least some of these readings, and/or cover some of the more advanced material. Supplementary reading: theory Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, 1979. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk” (Seminal) Supplementary reading: applications and empirical work DellaVigna, Stefano. “Psychology and economics: Evidence from the field.” Journal of Economic literature 47.2 (2009): 315-372. Benartzi, S. & Thaler, R.H., 2007. Heuristics and biases in retirement savings behavior. The journal of economic perspectives, pp.81-104. Farber, H., 2008. Reference-dependent preferences and labor supply: The case of New York City taxi drivers. The American Economic Review. Available at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aea/aer/2008/00000098/00000003/art00021 [Accessed November 19, 2015]. (Behavioural insights team) EAST: Four simple ways to apply behavioural insight Kellner, Reinstein and Riener, 2016. Conditional generosity and uncertain income: Field and lab evidence Material linked at giveifyouwin.org

2019-20: This has not been covered

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17. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. The payoff from staying Silent (cooperating) in each period is: −2×(1+g+g2+g3+...)−2×(1+g+g2+g3+...)-2 \times (1 + g + g^2 + g^3 + ... ) Here I get -2 in each period, starting today. Discounting this, we add up -2 (today), −2g−2g-2g (next period), −2g2−2g2-2g^2 (the period after next), etc, as represented above. The payoff from Confessing right away (after which both players Confess always) is: −1−3×(g+g2+g3+...)−1−3×(g+g2+g3+...) -1 -3 \times (g + g^2 + g^3 + ... ) Formula for a geometric series (where 0<g<10<g<10<g<1): g+g2+g3+g4...=g/(1−g)g+g2+g3+g4...=g/(1−g)g + g^2 + g^3 + g^4 ... = g/(1-g) Note on Maths: The standard derivation of this, which is pretty neat, is in the text. This formula is an important one in economics (and beyond), particularly for discounting a constant stream of payoffs, e.g., stock dividends Thus cooperation in a single period is ‘weakly preferred’ (at least as good) if (−2)×(1+g+g2+g3+...)≥(−1)+−3×(g+g2+g3+...)(−2)×(1+g+g2+g3+...)≥(−1)+−3×(g+g2+g3+...)(-2) \times (1 + g + g^2 + g^3 + ... ) \geq (-1) + -3 \times (g + g^2 + g^3 + ...) g+g2+g3+...≥1g+g2+g3+...≥1g + g^2 + g^3 + ... \geq 1 Note on the intuition for the second formula: the left side is loss of future payoffs (-3 vs -2 forever from next period, so a loss of 1 per period starting tomorrow). The right side is gain in ‘the present’ period (getting -1 rather than -2), so it is un-discounted. g/(1−g)≥1g/(1−g)≥1g/(1-g) \geq 1 g≥12

2019-20: you will not be asked to do this computation on the final exam, but you should understand the general idea

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18. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Individual optimisation solved problem

relevant for the final examination

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19. en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
1. Nash proved that if we allow mixed strategies, then every game with a finite number of players in which each player can choose from finitely many pure strategies has at least one Nash equilibrium.

It always has at least one Nash equilibrium (but it may only be a NE in mixed strategies).

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20. www.investopedia.com www.investopedia.com
1. More volatile underlying assets will translate to higher options premiums, because with volatility there is a greater probability that the options will end up in-the-money at expiration.

That's interesting

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21. www.investopedia.com www.investopedia.com
1. The option is European and can only be exercised at expiration.No dividends are paid out during the life of the option.Markets are efficient (i.e., market movements cannot be predicted).There are no transaction costs in buying the option.The risk-free rate and volatility of the underlying are known and constant.The returns on the underlying are normally distributed.

Some of the assumptions underlying the Black-Scholes model. Do these limit its realism and predictive power?

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22. www.annualreviews.org www.annualreviews.org
1. In low-income countries the vast majority are unwilling to pay for effective drugs simply because they are unable to pay. Low-income nations need more price discrimination—and vastly lower prices—if they are ever to afford the world's most effective medicines.

Does price discrimination help poor countries here? Which countries have more price-inelastic demand? Does PD increase social welfare for this case?

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23. europa.eu europa.eu
1. She found a German seller offering packs of the same nappies she buys in Luxembourg for the same price she normally pays. Looking more closely at the unit price, however, Nadine realised that the German packs contained 140 nappies, whereas the packs in Luxembourg had only 90, making them much more expensive. She switched straight away to buying all her nappies from the German shop.

If this was price discrimination... which country's consumers likely had the higher price elasticity?

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24. en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
1. Channel Tunnel

Is this tunnel a public good? Is it excludable? Is it rival?

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25. www.salisburycathedral.org.uk www.salisburycathedral.org.uk
1. I think that the preservation of these documents could be seen as providing pure public good. We value that these have been preserved for posterity even if we don't visit the Magna Carta ourselves. What do you think?

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26. Nov 2019
27. r4ds.had.co.nz r4ds.had.co.nz
1. map_dbl(df, mean)

it just performs this operation on all 'list elements'... here, vectors in the dataframe

2. out[i] <- fun(df[[i]])

this step is critical: we can apply the function referenced in the function argument

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28. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Holt, C., and S. Laury (2002), Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects, American Economic Review, v. 92 (5): 1644-1655. Crosetto, Paolo, and Antonio Filippin. “A theoretical and experimental appraisal of four risk elicitation methods.” Experimental Economics 19, no. 3 (2016): 613-641. Pedroni, Andreas, Renato Frey, Adrian Bruhin, Gilles Dutilh, Ralph Hertwig, and Jörg Rieskamp. “The risk elicitation puzzle.” Nature Human Behaviour 1, no. 11 (2017): 803.

These are worth looking at closely and discussing

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29. www.dropbox.com www.dropbox.com
1. Suggestion: look at this closely, and the associated readings

2. we will come back to this when we cover asymmetric information

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30. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. 11.11 Who benefits from 3DPD?

Suggestion: look at this closely, and the associated readings

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31. www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
1. University strikes: Students demand tuition fee refunds for planned walkouts

Interesting discussion, worth looking into.

2. It's an interesting point

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32. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Find the pure-strategy Nash equilibrium or equilibria

Tutorial - try to focus on how we know ther ewill be 2 pure strategies and 1 mixed strategy NE here

2. 3. Now draw the farmers’ ‘best response functions’ in a diagram.

Worth covering in tutorial starting from here, focusing on intuition rather than algebra and calculus

3. Do parts A and B; part C is optional enrichment

Worth covering A-B in tutorial if time permits

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33. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. This (answer) should say: MR=53-2Q=MC=5... the "-" or dash is confusing here

2. ero marginal cost for one more user.

We know this from the statement

Suppose also that the intended pool is large enough so that whatever number of families come on any day will not affect what people are willing to pay for the pool. (I.e., no congestion)

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34. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. This second assumption, called diminishing marginal utility, will imply ‘risk aversion’!

A student asked

I want to ask why risk-averse has a decreasing marginal utility? Thank you.

Response:

If someone has a decreasing marginal utility of income and they maximise expected utility then they will be risk averse.

This is something that takes a long time to fully explain, and I try to give an explanation in the web-book and in lecture (and again in tomorrow's lecture).

One simple intuition.: Risk averse essentially means "I will never take any fair gamble".

E.g., "I'll never accept a bet with an equal chance of losing or gaining some amount X." How does diminishing MU of income explain this? If I have diminishing MU of income then my utility is increasing in income at a decreasing rate.

The first units of income (e.g., going from 0 income to 15k income) add more utility than the later units of income (e.g., going from 15k income to 30k income) , which adds more than even later increments (e.g., going from 30k to 45k), etc.

So "an equal chance of losing or gaining X" would not be attractive to such a person. Why not? Because relative to any point "losing X" reduces my utility more than "gaining X" increases it.

E.g., in the above example, if you started at 15K income you wouldn't want to have an equal chance of losing or gaining 15K in income. Having 0 income would be terrible, while having 30k income would be better, but not 'that much' better. As we said, the utility difference between 0 and 15K is much greater than the utility difference between 15k and 30k... because of the assumption of diminishing marginal utility. So it's better to have 15k for sure than to have a 50/50 chance of 0k or 30k.

The 'utility loss from losing 15k' is greater than the 'utility gain from gaining 15k'. As expected utility weights the utility of each outcome by its probability and sums these, in considering a 1/2 chance of losing 15k and a 1/2 chance of gaining 15k these probabilities weight equally, so I only need to consider "does the utility cost of losing 15k exceed the utility gain from gaining 15k" in this example. Because of diminishing MU, we know it does not. Nor does it for any "equal chance of losing or gaining some amount X". Thus this person is risk-averse.

I hope this helps. Looking at the 'utility of income' diagrams may also be helpful.

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35. podcasts.apple.com podcasts.apple.com
1. Two statistics about reducing your risk of an early death made headlines around the world recently. The first seems to be a great reason to add a four-legged friend to your life. It suggests that owning a dog is tied to lowering your chance of dying early by nearly a quarter. The second statistic claims that even a minimal amount of running is linked to reducing your risk of premature death by up to 30%. Ruth Alexander finds out what’s behind these numbers and we hear from epidemiologist, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz.

It's amazing that statistics like these... (seemingly without even minimal obvious controls for age etc.) get reported so naively in the media. Note that one of the interviewees suggests one approach that would provide evidence on the impact of pets on longevity ... random dog assignment. He seems to doubt the health benefits; I don't know, it seems plausible to me, but I'd like to see some real evidence.

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36. davidreinstein.wordpress.com davidreinstein.wordpress.com
1. I've hedged (a bit). Have you?

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37. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. 2018 final exam with suggested answer guidelines

I just put this up ... last year's final exam with suggested answer guidelines

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38. www.dropbox.com www.dropbox.com
1. For problem 6 I'll award 1.5 marks for "CD" even though it's not correct. But I admit you need to look at the wording of this question carefully

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39. theconversation.com theconversation.com
1. Should we help companies tailor prices to your wage packet?

Please leave comments and questions here (or in below comments section if you prefer)

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40. ivypanda.com ivypanda.com
1. writing

If you are going for 'fancy stuff' you might mention markdown, rmarkdown/knitr etc. This will replace latex imho

2. LaTeX is a high-quality system equipped with special features for technical and scientific documentation. A great tool for thesis help due to its user-friendly interface and dozens of helpful features. For example, the tool automatically generates bibliographies and indexes.

If you are going to mention latex you should mention Overleaf

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41. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. NS: Ch 16 – public goods section only (skip Lindahl equiliibrium; sections on median voter and single-peaked preferences are optional)

Note that I give the reading from the Nicholson and Snyder text at the top of each section.

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42. Oct 2019
43. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Ans: B and D

Several students asked...

This problem seems to be on page 66 of the NS text. On the bottom left, it says, "This person would pay up to distance CD in other goods for the right to buy a second ticket at the original price."

I understand the confusion. They would pay up to C-D for the right to buy this at the given price, in addition to the price, reflected by that budget constraint. So the maximum total amount they would pay for the second ticket is the vertical distance B-D.

2. No, because if it were at such a point, it could raise its price and its revenue would increase and costs would decline.

Analogy: If I'm on a mountain and I see it is still sloping upwards, I am certainly not at the highest point.

If I am at a "point A" where I can improve my outcome (here, by raising revenue and reducing costs, then "point A" must NOT have been optimal. 'Never locate at point where you can clearly do better!'

3. Paying the vertical distance between B and D (sacrificing this amount of ‘other goods’) to obtain the second ticket will leave her at point D. This is on the same indifference curve aas point B so this leaves her equally well off. Thus this is the most she would be willing to pay for the second ticket.

Wang Chao:"can you expkain more?why not c to d? and why a is unachievable?"

DR: after buying the first ticket she is at point C. After this, paying vertical distance B-D (in other goods) puts her at point D, which makes her as well off as point B-- thus she is indifferent. She cannot choose point A because of the rationing policy.

4. No, because if it were at such a point, it could raise its price and its revenue would increase and costs would decline.

Just confirming - (d) IS the correct answer. If the firm can improve upon a choice then that choice must not have been an optimal choice. -DR

5. Mock mid-term exam

Students: Please comment on the questions (choose 1-2) you would like us to cover in tutorial, and if you like, let us know what questions or doubts you have.

6. Individual optimisation solved problem

This is a challenging problem. Knowing how to solve it and understanding what this means may help you both on the midterm assessment and the final examination

7. Individual optimisation solved problem

Student asked: Could something like this be on the final exam?

Answer: Yes

Student asked: Would you be able to 'avoid it by choosing a different question with less maths?'

Answer: Possibly/probably, but it's better to learn how to do it ... in case you don't like the other question either.

8. ‘people buy less when the price rises, all else equal’.

I should say, 'when it rises because of a shift in the supply curve or because a monopoly seller chooses to raise prices'

Really the principle is that in aggregate people are willing to buy fewer units at this higher price.

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44. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L) equal

This should say RTS as in 'marginal rate of technical substitution' ... fixing it now

2. MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L)

This should say RTS as in marginal rate of technical substitution

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45. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Sugden, Robert. “Looking for a Psychology for the Inner Rational Agent.” Social Theory and Practice 41, no. 4 (2015): 579-98.. ‘Predicting Hunger: The Effects of Appetite and Delay on Choice’; Read and van Leeuwen, 1998 … and related work… worth getting a sense of this, particularly in the context of the Sugden (2015) reading, such as Kahneman and Richard H. Thaler. 2006. “Anomalies: Utility Maximization and Experienced Utility.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20 (1): 221-234

2019: It's also worth getting a sense of these readings for the midterm. Try to at least get the 'gist' (basic idea) and recall some specific arguments and examples.

2. Waldfogel, Joel. “The deadweight loss of Christmas.” The American Economic Review 83.5 (1993): 1328-1336. Reinstein, David. “The Economics of the Gift.” (2014; working paper and chapter in Gift Giving and the’embedded’Economy in the Ancient World, F Carlà, M Gori - 2014). D. Colander \Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007: 215-225. Sugden, Robert. “Looking for a Psychology for the Inner Rational Agent.” Social Theory and Practice 41, no. 4 (2015): 579-98..

These are only indirectly relevant to the midterm; worth skimming/reading if you have time, and may come up later in the module

3. Friedman, Milton. “The methodology of positive economics.” (1953): 259. Classic but perhaps outdated Sugden, Robert. “Credible worlds: the status of theoretical models in economics.” Journal of Economic Methodology 7.1 (2000): 1-31. Sugden, Robert; Sitzia, Stefania. “Implementing theoretical models in the laboratory, and what this can and cannot achieve.” Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 18, 2011, p. 323-343.

2019: These are relevant for the midterm

4. AUT: Lecture 3 - Axioms of Consumer Preference and the Theory of Choice (note, slightly different notation)

The readings from Autor's course (note these are class notes not an 'academic article') are core and not supplementary... 2019: Relevant to the midterm.

5. Waldfogel, Joel. “The deadweight loss of Christmas.” The American Economic Review 83.5 (1993): 1328-1336. Reinstein, David. “The Economics of the Gift.” (2014). D. Colander \Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007: 215-225.

These are indirectly relevant for the 2019 midterm

6. Loomes, Graham, Chris Starmer, and Robert Sugden, 1991.“Observing Violations of Transitivity by Experimental Methods”. jstor link Choi, Syngjoo, et al. “Who is (more) rational?.” The American Economic Review 104.6 (2014): 1518-1550.a.

2019: These are relevant for the midterm ... but you don't need to know all the technical details

7. For maths, see also Mathematical methods for economic theory … also free online!

the "Khan academy" https://www.khanacademy.org is highly recommended

#### URL

46. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Here Y has a diminishing MU, but for X MU is constant

Student asked:

I am confused because I thought that diminishing MRS meant that it declined as consumption increased? So if Y increases, surely MRS increases as well since MRS=Y?

Ahh, I see a typo here ... it increases as Y increases, which is what we call diminishing MRS. Unfortunately, the term 'diminishing MRS' is confusing the way economists use it, at least in these texts ... it means that as we move 'down' an indifference curve (less Y more X) we are willing to give up less Y to gain a unit of X. So as we move the other way we increase Y (and decrease X) and the MRS rises... when I have more Y I'm willing to give up more of it.

#### URL

47. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. (Left) when goods are perfect substitutes, there is no Substitution effect of a price change. For prices lll and l′l′l', the minimum-cost consumption that attains U1U1U_1 is the same point (A,B)

This is backwards -- left is perfect complements (I said 'substitute/) and right is perfect substitutes (I said 'complements'. Rest is correct, wiill fix this shortly.

2. common measure of the burden: ‘amount a person would be willing to pay to avoid tax’, for a given revenue raised *A step-by-step illu

This illustration needs a small correction --- y2, x2 should line up with the red dot. Will fix it.

#### URL

48. Local file Local file
1. 2. That is, at this consumption plan he or she would be willing to give up 3 beer

THIS is a typo -- I'll fix it!

#### Annotators

49. mjo.osborne.economics.utoronto.ca mjo.osborne.economics.utoronto.ca
1. f*h'(r)

index 'h' here rather than 'n+h' because f*(r) does not take the (n-vector) x as an argument (it sets these optimally, conditional on the r-vector and computes the output).

#### URL

50. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Goals of this problem set: Re-acquaintance with mathematical approaches to Economics (e.g., simultaneous equations, graphing functions) Revising the supply and demand model and its implications, applying this to real-world problems, considering empirical approaches Understanding the logic of ‘difficult’ multiple choice questions (assessment tips) Discussing and writing a coherent response to applied Economics questions

It goes beyond this actually; I need to update the 'goals' section

#### URL

51. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. Note: The lecturing ‘slides’ are posted contemporaneously to each lecture, but there is no need to look at them – this web-book (‘handout’ is king). OK, fine… the link to the slides is HERE, but don’t look at them. (If you do you will need to press ‘o’ to see the navigation map.

Those were behind the VLE -- the github hosted slides are

HERE ... etc

#### URL

52. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. 3 Math tools and empirical analysis - – coverage outline

slides start HERE

#### URL

53. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. 4 Utility and Choice (L2)

Relevant slides start HERE

#### URL

54. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. 2 Economic Models (L1-2)

#### URL

55. Sep 2019
56. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. Alfred Marshall argued that a good’s price must equal both the cost to produce and the value (to consumers) of the last unit produced and consumed.

added some material below (orange) to give insight

2. With ‘single crossing’ (a fancy condition you can ignore in this module) there is a unique price where Qs(p)=Qd(p)Qs(p)=Qd(p)Q^s(p)=Q^d(p), and a unique quantity where the last unit’s value to the consumer equals its cost to produce.

I will elaborate on this a bit

#### URL

57. vle.exeter.ac.uk vle.exeter.ac.uk
1. 1∗1

this should say 2x1 -- I'll correct it

#### URL

58. htmlpreview.github.io htmlpreview.github.io
1. GTA’s: Ten minutes, i.e., minutes 5-15 of of tutorial, perhaps (after introducing yourself etc).

Does the timing seem right?

2. Goals of this problem set:

we can add specific notes here

#### URL

59. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. Not ‘output’ – ‘nets provided’ nor ‘paintings purchased’ (Total or marginal) impact per dollar = output per dollar ××\times impact per output

Ben Grodeck: I like the definition of Impact. It might be worth mentioning overhead costs and impact aren’t necessarily correlated (or at least not 100%).

DR: I would hope this is well-known in this audience, but you are probably right that it's worth mentioning. 'Overhead ratio' should not be (and does not seem to be) positively correlated to either the 'marginal impact of $1 donated on output' nor to 'marginal impact of$1 donated on ultimate outcomes'

2. Little giving to the most effective charities ‘Innumerate empathy’: key barrier to promoting effective giving?

Ben Grodeck: Is empathy innumerate? I thought as numbers got larger, people’s empathy actually decreased. (I see you mention this research later on in the presentation)

#### URL

60. Aug 2019
61. bookdown.org bookdown.org
1. When Pandoc converts Markdown to another output format, it uses a template under the hood. The template is a plain-text file that contains some variables of the form $variable$. These variables will be replaced by their values generated by Pandoc. Below is a very brief template for HTML output:

where do we find the default (gitbook) template to be able to tweak it?

#### URL

62. github.com github.com
1. When used locally, this feature requires that reveal.js runs from a local web server.

not sure what this means.

#### URL

63. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. Vague questions

incorporate examples

#### URL

64. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. 4.9 …Stating empirical results

sub-sub-section?

#### URL

65. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. “Has the legacy of British institutions increased or decrease the level of GDP in former colonies?”

link actual papers of course

2. “how do risk-averse individuals choose among a set of uncertain gambles?

specific example?

3. Fields

add JEL codes and links

4. 3.4 Theoretical vs. Applied (focus)

need more examples here!

#### URL

66. Jul 2019
67. r4ds.had.co.nz r4ds.had.co.nz
1. The book is written in RMarkdown with bookdown. It is automatically rebuilt from source by travis. R4DS is a collaborative effort and many people have contributed fixes and improvements via pull request.

anyone other r4ds_slackers using bookdown?

2. Anyone in the Slack group interested in sharing comments directly on this page via this hypothesis tool? We can use the tag "r4ds_slackers"

#### URL

68. beta.effectivethesis.com beta.effectivethesis.com
1. e your thesis meaningfu

testing a note -- can anyone see this?

#### URL

69. beta.effectivethesis.com beta.effectivethesis.com
1. I'll try to find time to go through this; going to recommend it to my students at Exeter Uni, Economics. Anyone else on here seeing this?

#### URL

70. daaronr.github.io daaronr.github.io
1. just

test -- I will change this word to 'only'

#### URL

71. demo.aimarketer.com demo.aimarketer.com
1. This tool is designed to help you inform your marketing, improve retention of your donors and ultimately increase your income. It means you can target your donors in a really timely way, when you are most at risk of losing them and when they are most likely to donate, maximising your impact whilst still adhering to The Fundraising Regulations.

Henrik can you see these notes?

#### URL

72. bookdown.org bookdown.org
1. sample(1:6, 1)

are these interactive/Shiny? I can't get them to 'run'

#### URL

73. bookdown.org bookdown.org
1. A scatter plot represents two dimensional data

just testing a comment