Chapter 18

I would give this chapter a 1.5 out of 3 for difficulty. This is because it has a lot of broader explanations of concepts which I find to be easier, but it also seemed to cover a lot about how different factors affect the supply, demand, and wages of labor. One fact they talked about that I found interesting was how both the amount of workers in the market and the average wage of workers in the market has gone up over the past four decades. Another interesting idea was the information put forth about immigration and how it affects the economy. Up until this point I have mostly stayed neutral about my opinion on immigration as I didn't know too many of the adverse or positive affects. As we progress through these chapters I will keep my eyes open to see what else the effects of it are.

Chapter 17

I would give this chapter a one out of three because it mostly dealt with concepts that we have talked about it previous chapters. It was also very logical in determining how firms would act, and how firms would want to act. While it mostly focused on duopolies, this thinking can be translated to any small number of firms. The dynamic between self interest conflicting with the interests of others was interesting. Members of a cartel both want to raise their own output, while keeping the output of the group as a whole, lower. The methods that are used to keep prices low were also interesting. Of course as a consumer I should mostly want business practices to be competitive, but it's still interesting seeing how firms interact nonetheless. The part about predatory pricing was also fun to read as I've always thought it was a very viable business strategy, but now I can see one way the smaller company could survive the price cuts.

Chapter 16

I would give this chapter a 1.5 out of 3 because it built on many of the previous concepts that we have already learnt. As the name might suggest, competitive monopolies take traits from both perfectly competitive markets and monopolistic markets. We were also introduced to oligopolies for the first time in this chapter, a market which appears to share many characteristics of a monopoly. In the short run competitive monopolies function more like a monopoly but in the long run they function more like a perfectly competitive market because of firms entering and exiting the market, causing economic profit to return to zero. Excess capacity relates to the output rule with monopolies because they don't operate at the efficient scale as to keep their price up. As we see towards the end of the chapter, evaluating and solving inefficiency that competitive monopolies create can be hard and nearly impossible.

Chapter 15

I would give this chapter a difficulty of 1.5. I thought that it seemed relatively simple and logical with its concepts and and it built a bit on what we had previously learned in other chapters. The chapter showed the social costs of monopolies and how they can arise. The three main reasons were from the government, from being a "natural monopoly", or from the less common monopoly based off of the control of resources. Monopolies can have a detriment to welfare and cause dead-weight loss however because of the price being higher than the socially efficient quantity. Monopolies can also be positive however in the sense that they increase the incentive for research and in the case of natural monopolies, can reduce prices for the consumer. If monopolies are well managed and regulated they can be positive sometimes but it's the government's job to ensure that this happens.

Chapter 14

I would give this section a difficulty of 2.5. It's similar to the last chapter and builds on some of the previous concepts we learned, but that's a part of what makes this section difficult for me. As I didn't have as good of an understanding as normal, this chapter will also be hard for me. There are a lot of equations again and different circumstances to remember about how curves relate to each others positions and the slopes of other curves. One part that I was able to relate to a previous chapter was the way firms enter and exit the market. In a way it's like finding the equilibrium quantity and price, but this time with the quantity being firms. I was also interested but confused on the explanation of firms choosing to shut down in the short run or long run, because of the difference in costs versus revenue.

Chapter 13

I would give this chapter a 2.5 for difficulty. This was by far the hardest chapter that I've read to date, as there was a ton of content to cover, as well as a lot of new vocabulary. I did understand the basics however with average vs. marginal cost and how businesses make their decisions based off of statistics like those. There can be a lot of variation from the models they presented us, and simply trying to get all the terms straight in my head is tough. For instance in some models hiring more workers has a decreasing amount of the product produced, while in others the first few workers actually increase efficiency. A business also has to compare their fixed and incidental costs to decided the amount of workers to hire. I remember my dad told me a while ago that it's good to invest in businesses that have a lot of incidental costs rather than fixed because if the market is doing poorly, they can always just scale back on production.

Chapter 11

I would give this chapter a 1.5 for difficulty. I think the only hard part will be making sure that I remember the difference between common resources, public goods, private goods, and natural monopolies. If you know which is which its not to hard to discern which category a certain good or service falls under. As we said in class, goods can shift from public goods to common resources based on how many people use them. If one persons use isn't affecting another than it is a public good, but if they do affect others than it's a common resource. This was another important chapter to showcase the governments importance in an economy. People respond to incentives and if they think that they can get something they want for free without actually paying for it then they are likely to do so. The government is important to minimize free-riding, and create economic efficiency where people would otherwise not pay for it.