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Cataloged Resource Summary

 

Title

The Construction and Identification of Demand Curves: A Concerted Experiment for Principles Instructor and Dining Services

Author

Andreas Ortmann and Mary McAteer Kennedy

Category

Consumer Economics

Type

Non-computerized experiment

Description

Demand curves are one of two key ingredients of the economist's totem--supply and demand analysis. Their identification and construction are notoriously difficult, especially as regards classroom instruction. More recently, several authors (De Young 1993, Ortmann and Colander 1995; Neral and Ray 1995; Delemeester and Neral 1995; Brauer 1995) have used classroom experiments to illustrate concepts related to supply and demand analysis. Classroom experiments allow for a far-reaching control of the environment. This strength of traditional (classroom) experiments is also its biggest weakness. In a sense, the induced environments are too controlled, thereby tidying up the inevitable messiness of research, and making the identification problem disappear.1 This has led some instructors to simple in-classroom construction and evaluation of production and cost functions (Neral and Ray 1995) that do not use the induced value approach typical for traditional (classroom) experiments. Here we report a simple complementary semester-long experiment involving the construction and identification of demand curves in a college environment.

URL

http://mcnet.marietta.edu/~delemeeg/expernom/s97.html#ortmann

Home URL

http://mcnet.marietta.edu/~delemeeg/expernom.html
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