Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Where's Giffen?

Freakonomics has a neat post on the process of discovering Giffen goods and it's policy implications as it fits in with their experience in deriving this result, I found it interesting throughout. Giffen goods, for the uninitiated, are goods that get consumed more as price rises, implying an upward sloping demand curve. This causes problems. It's usually at this point in a class that you enjoy a couple minutes of trying to isolate goods that would fit this category. Undergrads usually get into it too...it's one of the not-many moments in microeconomic theory that will generate class interaction.

No word yet on the progress of isolating the even more elusive Ryan good...

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