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Chapter 1: Q 6 (page 15)

Recently, a bank was trying to decide what fee to charge for “expedited payments”—payments that the bank would transmit extra-speedily to enable customers to avoid late fees on cable TV bills, electric bills, and the like. To try to determine what fee customers were willing to pay for expedited payments, the bank conducted a survey. It was able to determine that many of the people surveyed already paid fees for expedited payment services that exceeded the maximum fees that they said they were willing to pay. How does the bank’s finding relate to economists’ traditional focus on what people do, rather than what they say they will do?

Short Answer

Expert verified

The reaction is based on bounded rational behavior.

Step by step solution

01

Step 1. Bounded Rational Behavior.

Bounded rationality behavior explains that people are rational but not completely as they do not examine every possible choice given to them but instead sort among the alternatives.

02

Step 2. The bank's finding.

The bank's finding shows that the people show bounded rational behavior. Despite being given various choices agree to pay more than their willingness by a simple method.to make a decision.

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How do you suppose the higher taxes have affected the incentive for Greek residents to engage in tax avoidance, or legally reduce tax liabilities, including earning less income that is subjected to taxation?

Consider two models for estimating, in advance of an election, the shares of votes that will go to rival candidates. According to one model, pollsters’ surveys of a randomly chosen set of registered voters before an election can be used to forecast the percentage of votes that each candidate will receive. This first model relies on the assumption that unpaid survey respondents will give truthful responses about how they will vote and that they will actually cast a ballot in the election. The other model uses prices of financial assets (legally binding IOUs) issued by the Iowa Electronic Markets, operated by the University of Iowa, to predict electoral outcomes. The final payments received by owners of these assets, which can be bought or sold during the weeks and days preceding an election, depending on the shares of votes the candidates actually end up receiving. This second model assumes that owners of these assets wish to earn the highest possible returns, and it indicates that the market prices of these assets provide an indication of the percentage of votes that each candidate will actually receive on the day of the election.

(a) Which of these two models for forecasting electoral results is more firmly based on the rationality assumption of economics?

(b) How would an economist evaluate which is the better model for forecasting electoral outcomes?

For each of the following approaches that an economist might follow in examining a decision-making process, identify whether the approach relies on the rationality assumption or on the assumption of bounded rationality:

(a) To make predictions about how many apps a person will download onto her tablet device, an economist presumes that the individual faces limitations that make it impossible for her to examine every possible choice among relevant apps.

(b) In evaluating the price that an individual will be willing to pay for a given quantity of a particular type of healthcare service, a researcher assumes that the person considers all relevant health care options in pursuit of his own long-term satisfaction with resulting health outcomes.

(c) To determine the amount of time that a person will decide to devote to watching online videos each week, an economist makes the assumption that the individual will feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of videos available online and will respond by using a rule of thumb.

Explain, in your own words, the rationality assumption, and contrast it with the assumption of bounded rationality proposed by adherents of behavioral economics.
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