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In this chapter we will describe the consumer’s standard budget constraint. We will give
some examples of special budget constraints created by non-market rationing devices, like coupon rationing. We will also analyze budget constraints involving consumption over time. After describing various budget constraints, we will turn to the consumer’s basic economic problem: how to find the best consumption bundle, or how to maximize his utility, subject to the budget constraint. We will do this graphically using indifference curves, and we will do it analytically with utility functions. In the appendix to this chapter we will describe the Lagrange function method for maximizing a function subject to a constraint.
In this chapter we will discuss the economic theory of preferences in some detail. We will make various assumptions about a consumer’s feelings about alternative consumption bundles. We will assume that when given a choice between two alternative bundles, the consumer can make a comparison. (This assumption is called completeness.) We will assume that when looking at three alternatives, the consumer is rational in the sense that, if she says she likes the first better than the second and the second better than the third, she will also say that she likes the first better than the third. (This is part of what is called transitivity.) We will examine other basic assumptions that economists usually make about a consumer’s preferences: one says that the consumer prefers more of each good to less (called monotonicity), and another says that a consumer’s indifference curves (or sets of equally-desirable consumption bundles) have a
certain plausible curvature (called convexity). We will describe and discuss the consumer’s rate of tradeoff of one good against another (called her marginal rate of substitution).
In the last chapter, we discussed von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions, which are used to represent people’s preferences in situations where there is uncertainty—where information is imperfect or missing. We will continue the analysis of decision making under uncertainty in this chapter. But now we will focus on the problems that arise when information is unequally distributed, in the sense that some people in the market know more than other people. More precisely, we are now considering markets for goods or services where there is uncertainty, and the uncertainty is more on one side of the market (e.g., the buyers’ side) than on the the other side of the market (e.g., the sellers’ side). These are called markets with asymmetric information; the information is “asymmetric” because people on one side know more than people on the other side. In a world of perfect certainty there would be no asymmetric information, but in this chapter we will allow uncertainty. It turns out that asymmetric information may create serious market failures—failures that may need remedies.
In most of the last chapter we modeled a firm with one input and one output. However,
assuming one input is unrealistic; most goods and services are produced by firms with a variety of different inputs. The production of something as simple as corn really requires land, labor, trucks, tractors, combines, fertilizer, pesticides, possibly irrigation, and so on. Moreover, the single-input model fails to capture a basic economic problem. In this chapter we will assume the inputs are both (or all) freely variable. In the next chapter we will assume one or more of the inputs is fixed over the underlying time horizon, while one or more of the inputs is variable. Economists call a period of time that is so long that all of the firm’s inputs are freely variable the long run, and they call a period of time that is so short that one or more inputs is fixed the short run. Therefore this chapter is about the theory of the firm in the long run. The next chapter is about the theory of the firm in the short run. We are doing the long run theory first because it is simpler and more elegant than the short run theory.
We now turn to another general equilibrium model, where everything is taken into account simultaneously. But in this model we will analyze production. To keep this model easy we will assume there is only one person in the economy, who functions both as a producer and as a consumer. We call that one person Robinson Crusoe. (The reader interested in literature may remember that in Defoe’s novel, Robinson is alone on the island for many years before Friday arrives. Our production model can be viewed as an economic analysis of work and consumption on the island, before Friday’s arrival.) In this chapter, we will describe the production economy, and identify the Pareto optimal production outcomes in that economy. We will discuss market equilibria in the production economy. We will end the chapter with production versions of the first and second fundamental theorems of welfare economics, which will provide the connections between the market mechanism and efficiency in production.
In this chapter, we put together consumers interested in buying a good and firms interested in selling the good. We will start out by describing what we mean by perfect competition; this requires price-taking behavior by all parties, homogeneous goods, perfect information, and free entry and exit in the long run. We will derive industry supply curves in the short run and in the long run. With consumers’ actions aggregated into an industry demand curve, and firms’ actions aggregated into an industry supply curve, we will discuss excess demand and excess supply. Then we will describe the competitive market equilibrium. Next we will turn to the welfare properties of the market equilibrium. We will define producer’s surplus for a single firm and producers’ surplus for all the firms in the market. We will show how the competitive market equilibrium maximizes social surplus, that is, the sum of consumers’ surplus and producers’ surplus. Finally we will analyze the deadweight loss, or loss in social surplus, created by a per-unit tax on the good being sold in the market.
In this chapter, we will look at market failures created by public goods. A public good is a
good that is non-exclusive in use. That is, if it is there and available for use by one consumer, then it is there and available for use by all consumers. In a sense, these are goods that create super-externalities. For example, a judicial system is a public good. If the laws, courts, and police are in place to protect person i, they are there to protect person j as well. In this chapter, we will first provide some examples of public goods. Next we will describe a simple model of public goods. The model makes it clear why private market provision of a public good is inefficient. That is, it makes clear why public goods result in market failure. Then we will turn to the Samuelson optimality condition, the condition that must hold for the quantity of a public good to be Pareto optimal or efficient. After that we will discuss the free rider problem—the problem of consumer i’s taking advantage of consumer j’s decision to produce some of the public good, which, since it is available for i to use, causes i to take a free ride on j’s good citizenship.
Firms in industry clusters have market prices that are more efficient than firms outside clusters. To establish causality, we analyze exogenous firm relocations and find that firms that relocate into industry clusters have higher levels of industry information in their prices. We argue that geographical proximity allows for information spillovers, reducing marginal cost to information producers. Our evidence supports this view: Analysts are more likely to cover stocks inside industry clusters, and when institutional investors have a large position in one stock in the industry cluster, they are more likely to hold other stocks in the same industry cluster.
Older workers make up a substantial portion of today’s labor force. Yet little is known about the beliefs held by this age group. Our study offers some much needed insights into intersectionality around this group, by investigating how older workers’ perceptions of supervisors performing a gendered leadership behavior are impacted by a supervisors’ sex, age, and gendered attributes. The results show that these supervisors are perceived most favorably when they possess communal qualities and/or when they are depicted as being older than their direct reports. Our results also reveal that, when these supervisors are not perceived as communal, male but not female supervisors, experience a backlash. Within this context, young female leaders appear to be at an advantage when compared with young male leaders. This study advances the literature on the ‘think manager–think male’ stereotype and has the practical benefit of offering insights into leader-follower interactions in today’s aging workplace.
The divide between hard law and soft law approaches to global regulation of corporations in relation to human rights is partly based on empirical assumptions. Taking a step back, we assess the claims concerning the current state of global regulation and political feasibility of hard law approaches. Moving beyond the usual suspects, we map 98 existing standards that regulate corporations and find a great variation in how different sectors treat human rights and accountability issues. Turning to the explanation of the current jungle of global business and human rights regulation, we contrast and test dominant and competing expressive theories with a consequentialist commitment curve, in which corporations and states seek to minimize human rights commitments. We find support for all approaches to regulatory reform, but argue that greater attention should be given to the consequentialist insights, and how political economy can be leveraged to strengthen regulatory outcomes.
We examine supervisor-subordinate (dis)agreement regarding perceptions of the supervisor’s ethical leadership and its relationship to organizational deviance. We find that, on average, supervisors rate themselves more favorably on ethical leadership compared to how followers rate them. In addition, polynomial regression results reveal that unit-level organizational deviance is higher when there is agreement about lower levels of ethical leadership, and disagreement when supervisors rate themselves higher on ethical leadership than subordinates’ ratings of the supervisors. Finally, drawing on social influence theories, we look at antecedents of (dis)agreement and find that supervisors’ beliefs about themselves (that they were “better-than-average” ethical leaders) and others (their assumptions about whether the morality of their subordinates is malleable or not) are associated with self-other (dis)agreement on ethical leadership.
There are fundamental changes afoot in the global economy, and no simple answers for countries that want to improve or even maintain their levels of development. In recent decades, national and regional development models have come under increasing scrutiny, and countries are trying to determine what kinds of policies and institutions provide the best opportunities for long-term growth and prosperity.
This chapter will explore these issues through a comparative analysis that focuses on how international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) have shaped the development trajectories of China and Mexico, two of the most dynamic emerging economies in the world. The first section provides a broad comparison of the development models in Latin America and China, with an emphasis on how each has changed in recent decades. The second section uses international trade data to examine industrial upgrading patterns in Mexico and China, with an emphasis on their competitive niches in the US market and why China is taking the lead in a number of different industries. The third and final section looks more closely at a new feature of China's industrial upgrading pattern known as supply chain cities. China's unique model of economic development is fascinating in its own right, but China's escalating importance as a supplier, a market, and recently as a source of outward direct investment makes many countries and regions in the world highly dependent on China's future economic performance.
Comparative Development Models
Since the mid-1980s, globalization has been associated with a neoliberal model of development that has produced rapid economic growth and improving standards of living in some parts of the world, most notably East Asia. In other regions, like Latin America, neoliberalism has been marked by slow economic growth, large-scale unemployment, social deterioration, and political protest. Development models in both Latin America and East Asia, however, have evolved considerably during this period.
Within these regions, China and Mexico present particularly interesting cases because of notable contrasts as well as similarities in their development policies and economic trajectories. Mexico is the most diversified and export-oriented economy in Latin America, with an emphasis on manufactured exports to the United States. China is one of the world's fastest growing economies, with extensive diversification and growing exports to the world. Mexico and China compete head-to-head in many product categories in the US market
Perkins and Murmann (2018) advance a provocative thesis, based on Tesla Motors, that ‘a well-funded company could develop a new electric vehicle (EV) from scratch and move it into production within 3 to 5 years. . . .’ This thesis of feasibility – indeed likelihood – of more new entrant EV automakers is at odds with my recent work (e.g., Jacobides, MacDuffie, & Tae, 2016; MacDuffie, 2013) which argues that automotive OEMs have been able to prevent extensive value migration to suppliers and new entrants due to their structural role as system integrators with the capabilities to manage a primarily integral product and organizational architecture. This role is bolstered by societal demands for OEMs to meet regulatory requirements for safety and handle legal liability claims. These structural features have helped automotive OEMs avoid the fate of IBM, which saw massive value migration, after introducing the modular PC, to Intel and Microsoft (suppliers of key components). These same features, I argue, will position these OEMs for continued centrality, forestalling a wave of successful new entrants despite many new, disruptive changes in technology and business models.