Intro Micro Your Name(s):__________________________________________
Professor Kane
Problem Set 2
For graphs, it is often best to use Excel or draw your graph and attach the picture
Recall Beyoncé from PS1 (CONTINUATION OF PS1). Reuse the tables you produced there based on:
serving
MU Duck
Total Worker Hours
1
$45.00
0.75
2
$42.75
1.58
3
$40.61
2.48
4
$38.58
3.48
5
$36.65
4.58
6
$34.82
5.79
7
$33.08
7.12
8
$31.43
8.58
9
$29.85
10.18
10
$28.36
11.95
1. (6 points) Monopoly and equilibrium
a. (2 points) Beyoncé gets smart and realizes that she is the only quality bistro around. Calculate the marginal revenue she gets for each additional serving as the change in total revenue (price times sales). Graph this. What is the new quantity of sales and the new price?http://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?&id=OIP.HzKxGKqvxjRKdJtWuEVOWQEsDh&w=300&h=225&c=0&pid=1.9&rs=0&p=0&r=0
b. (1 point) Shade in the entire area of consumer surplus on your monopoly graph. Shade in the entire area of producer surplus.
c. (2 points) Estimate consumer and producer surplus under perfect competition and under monopoly. What is the dollar value of each, and of total social surplus? Which is better for consumers? Which is better for producers? Which is better for society? Explain.
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d. (1 point) Prices and Regulations Hepatitis C is a potentially deadly disease of the liver. Sovaldi is a recently-approved drug that, when used in combination with other drugs, can cure Hepatitis C in as many as 93-95% of the cases. The company that markets this drug, Gilead Science, sells it for $1,000 a pill (for an 12 week, 84 pill course of treatment) in the US, and for $4 a pill in India (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-drug-price- sofosbuvir-sovaldi-india-us-20160104-story.html ). The company’s stock price soared on approval of the page1image9324160drug, from $20/share to $112/share. (It now sells at about $80.) Think about the elasticity of demand and supply for life-saving drugs and where the MC of producing more is very low. Would you recommend that the government regulate the price of Sovaldi? Why? Why not?
2. (4 points) Moving Equilibrium. Show the effect of each on the monopoly market equilibrium; you don’t need to have exact answers but explain the direction of change in the demand and/or marginal cost curves.
For each of the following produces, explain whether the change in the market price and quantity sold reflects a shift in supply or a shift in demand and in what direction.
Product
Prices
Quantity sold
Supply or demand curve shift? Direction?
Sales of vegan ice cream as more people become vegan
Up
Up
DVDs with more streaming services
Down
Down
Salmon after we completely pollute the ocean
Up
Down
Sales of electric vehicles with improvements in battery storage
down
Up
3. (5 points) Social supply and demand
a. (2 points) Does the community demand curve slope down? Even with diminishing marginal utility for the individual, the community demand curve may not be downward sloping. People may conclude that Beyonce’s duck is good because others are eating in her restaurant (information). People may enjoy eating in the restaurant only if other people are there (network effects). People may value her restaurant more because it is expensive (status effects). See the source image
i. Draw a demand curve for her restaurant under assumptions of information, network effects, status effects. Do you still have a downward sloping demand curve? Do you necessarily have an equilibrium price and quantity where demand equals marginal cost?
ii. If demand curves slope up, will there be an equilibrium between supply and demand?
b. (2 points) Can a perfectly competitive business survive? Before a single plane was built, Boeing spent as much as $50 billion on the 787 Dreamliner. Planes can then be made at relatively low cost.
i. If Boeing sells planes at marginal cost, will it be able to recoup its investment?
ii. If companies that invest in fixed costs cannot survive, can we have a productive economy?
c. (1 point) If practice makes perfect, do supply curve slope up? As Adam Smith had predicted, most production processes are characterized by learning by doing with increasing efficiency over time and with the experience. In the production of liberty ships during World War II, for example (see the graph to the left), the labor required to build a ship fell by as much as two thirds over less than four years because experience allowed workers and engineers to become better at building ships and to figure out better ways to organize production.See the source image
i. Draw a marginal cost curve for a firm where productivity increases with output. Do supply curve slope up?
