...What is Freakonomics? Freakonomics is an interesting book that evokes the human motivation and mind. It shows you a common world, through a different perspective and view. The authors approach to economics is done in an unconventional way, more like a curios explorer. Freakonomics does not have one common theme, it is based on four essential ideas: incentives are the basis of modern life, conventional wisdom is often wrong, dramatic effects often have distant even subtle causes and experts use their informational advantage to serve their own interest. The primary point in Freakonomics is that economics is essentially the study of incentives, explains why people behave the way they do and how they benefit from what they do. There are three basic types of incentives: economic, social, and moral. What is an incentive? Incentives, are the corner stones of modern life. Incentives are also the things that encourages someone to do something that they would not normally do. The three types of incentives that motivate our decisions are moral, financial and social. When someone makes a decision based on moral incentive they are doing what they feel is right. When a financial incentive exist the persons decision is based on money and social incentives is when someone makes a decision...
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...The Value of Curiosity- Exploring the Hidden Side of Everything Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, is an important economical book that shows examples of economics that most people do not understand or realize. This book displays the value of incentives, how the average consumer does not know much about the markets they buy in, cause and effects of these markets, and showing the distrust in most experts. To me, it proves that an average person can’t really look at the economic trends of a lot of markets because the patterns and information are so deep, that the average consumer can’t just ‘dig’ up. Freakonomics allows hidden information and small things that mean so much to come to surface, so the economy that surrounds us can be better understood for a more promising financial future. In chapter one, Levitt and Dubner really focus on incentives. Incentives are the motivator in which I do everything in my life. Sometimes incentives strike negative behavior in people because the amount of power in the motivation. In the chapter, they demonstrate three examples of this bad behavior. The remainder of this chapter brings together schoolteachers, sumo wrestlers, and a bagel salesman. The school teachers are under so much pressure to present excellent grade scores by their students in order to look good in front of the state, that they lose focus in the actual importance. Teachers begin to teach for a test and not for the benefit of the children’s futures. I thought...
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...Reaction Paper Freakonomics: Documentary Emmanuel S. Garcia Managerial Economics Land Bank of the Philippines Freakonomics was a good way to introduce the basic concepts of economics applied in everyday living and what we can learn from that. It primary aim seems to open the eyes of the general public to the fact that economics should be a conscious part of our way of life. Generally, what it says is that economics is a good tool in understanding and eventually helping us decide important aspects of our day to day living. The innovative ideas presented in the various segments tries to alter a lot of perspectives on how we think. At the end of it all, it leaves one with the thought that "conventional wisdom" is not what we thought it was. For example, it was interesting to note how the principle "Rational people think at the margin" was discussed in the movie as a real estate example. Explained in layman's terms, agents tend to advice homeowners to sell their house even at a lower price if the marginal benefit for the agent is low. The documentary demonstrated the pervasiveness of incentives in society. I agree to Levitt and Dubner’s premise that it is commonly accepted that for most people, given the right price or the right incentive, 1. cheating will always be considered by the most affected people as an option 2. there will always be a desire to maximize the incentive 3. certain behaviors could be changed. The first premise was elaborated further on the portions...
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...TO Prepared by S. Clayton Palmer and Adjunct Instructor Department of Economics Weber State University & Westminster College of Salt Lake J. Lon Carlson Associate Professor Department of Economics Illinois State University PREFACE Introduction Welcome to the Student’s Guide to Freakonomics! The purpose of this guide is to help you better understand the analyses presented in Freakonomics by providing a sort of “bridge” between the material covered in a traditional course in economic principles and topics addressed in what we consider to be one of the most fascinating books we’ve encountered in economics literature. Many students view economics as a very difficult, if not impossible, course to master.This perception is, however, most likely based on observations of the experiences of other students who did not apply the proper approach to learning economics. In many courses, simple memorization is enough. In economics, we would argue, this is not the case.While you need to understand the meaning of basic terms and concepts, you also need to be able to apply economic concepts in specific situations. In other words, you need to develop the ability to think like an economist.The authors of Freakonomics certainly show the reader how to do just that.The material presented here is intended to make the job a little easier. Organization of the Student’s Guide We organized the material in this guide to help you identify the key points in each chapter and check to ensure that you have...
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...MIGUEL, Karl Ann D. INTSOCI C33 Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Introduction: The Hidden Side of Everything There are several things required to understand the world through economics: first, knowing the incentives of all parties; second, realizing that conventional wisdom is usually wrong; third, understanding that most effects have subtle and distant causes and the most obvious is often the wrong one; fourth, specialists like salesman and lawyers use obscure knowledge to achieve their own ends and the internet helps to erode this advantage by making knowledge more freely available to people; lastly, data is invaluable to understanding the world. Chapter 1: What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? People all learn to respond to incentives, whether positive or negative from the outset of life. An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social and moral. Economic incentive is something material or tangible; moral is based of self-judgments; social is terribly powerful as it depicts what other people think of you resulting from your own actions or choices. Any incentive is inherently a trade-off; whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Cheating is a natural act getting more for less. The government required the High-Stakes Testing as part of...
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...Topics Development BGS Is South Africa in danger of an Arab spring? * Could generalize this into something like * What indicators point to a social uprising looming? * Could focus on certain political, social or economic factors in general * And perhaps compare this or look to what lead to the uprisings in other countries What is or should China do about its aging population? * Could do a comparative study with Japan? Other countries. Upliftment of the poor – can SA learn from China? * Are there better countries to learn from? * Do comparative study between different countries What are African countries doing/not doing (strategies, policies) to derive long-term benefit from investment from China * Could generalize this to * How can emerging? countries derive long term benefit foreign investment from developed countries * Could focus on South Africa and China’s relationship * Could look at all countries China works with BGS or ECO How do SWF’s benefit the welfare/growth of a country? * Could focus on UAE’s use of SWF’s * Could compare it to how other countries use it ECO Do leading indicators influence confidence indicator? * Could look at whether the different indicators influence each other? Sentiment which increases leads to better leading which leads to better sentiment etc Something with Behavioural Economics/Finance (COULD BE FINANCE) Germany vs Austria : Organ Donor – Ticking...
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...Whitney Summers Ms. Wert English 101 H December 3, 2012 Genetic Engineering Just imagine the scene: and newlywed wife and husband are sitting down with a catalog, browsing joyously, pointing and awing at all the different options, fantasizing about all the possibilities that could become of their future. Is this a catalog for new furniture? No. This catalog for all features, phenotype and genotype, for the child they are planning to have. It is basically a database for parents to pick and choose all aspects of their children, from the sex of the child, to looks, and even to personality traits. Parents since the beginning of time have “planned” to have children, but never have they been able to legitimately “plan” out their child. This scene does not seem typical for our time and age, but truthfully it is what is becoming of our world. Through substantial research and experimentation that is taking place, scientists, specifically biologists, are becoming keener to the field of engineering; Genetic engineering that is. When one thinks of “genetic engineering,” the first thought is probably a perfect child, or paradoxically some inconceivable creature, forged under the microscope in a scientific laboratory. Though both of these are genetic engineering, many people do not consider other things, such as genetic engineering of agriculture and medicine, both of which are extremely useful. Through the genetic altering of plants and crops, scientists have been able to manipulate...
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...responsive to incentives, differences in incentives explain all major variations in wealth and poverty across societies, and easy institutional changes will create the incentives to launch a brave new world. This is the buzz that animates Freakonomics, the book, and now the movie. This is the vision that led Roland Fryer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, to offer students in the New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC school systems “cash for grades.” Deirdre McCloskey earlier in her career did stellar work advancing this program in economics — her virtuoso writings recruited me to the study of the history of economies. But having over many years considered the general problem of economic growth, and the specific puzzle of the timing and location of the Industrial Revolution, McCloskey has come to a stunning epiphany. This is that incentives explain very little of the huge gaps in wealth across the world. Growth is a cultural production, a society wide embrace of “bourgeois virtues.” Specifically, she claims, growth came because the activities of marketing, profiting, and innovating have become in our society uniquely respected, admired and praised. The rise of the Bourgeois Virtues has created societies such as those of Northern Europe, so primed for growth that even though the grabbing hand of the state is on every shoulder, people continue to produce and innovate. I fully agree with McCloskey about the surprisingly poor ability of incentives alone to account...
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...Time is intertwined with change, but nevertheless, some ancient principles remain essential. Leaders thrive or fail based on the techniques they implement to gain and sustain power, which influence the development of human societies. Leaders can create a constantly shifting political landscape that shapes the lives of those that are governed. A leader must know how to motivate their followers in order to awaken their desire for victory. It's vital that a leader have an ambitious, pragmatic and objective mindset in various situations. However, even with all of this considered, they must maintain an appearance and reputation for their morality that others will approve of or they will be dismantled by the public. Among the main concerns a ruler should have are their subjects, the people of an empire are sheep, and it’s the rulers job to be a guide them towards their goals as a shepherd. Any good ruler has to know how to manipulate the desires and wishes of their people so that they contribute to the leader's goal rather than...
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...FREAKONOMICS A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Revised and Expanded Edition Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner CONTENTS AN EXPLANATORY NOTE In which the origins of this book are clarified. vii PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION xi 1 INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything In which the book’s central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong . . . How “experts”— from criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists—bend the facts . . . Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life . . . What is “freakonomics,” anyway? 1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? 15 In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side—cheating. Contents Who cheats? Just about everyone . . . How cheaters cheat, and how to catch them . . . Stories from an Israeli day-care center . . . The sudden disappearance of seven million American children . . . Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago . . . Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win . . . Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt? . . . What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think. 2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents? 49 In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information,...
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...Business Process Management Methodology 1 Introduction From Wikipedia, we copy: «A business process is a set of linked activities that create value by transforming an input into a more valuable output. Both input and output can be artifacts and/or information and the transformation can be performed by human actors, machines, or both. There are three types of business processes: 1. Management processes - the processes that govern the operation. Typical management processes include "Corporate Governance" and "Strategic Management". 2. Operational processes - these processes create the primary value stream, they are part of the core business. Typical operational processes are Purchasing, Manufacturing, Marketing, and Sales. 3. Supporting processes - these support the core processes. Examples include Accounting, Recruitment, IT-support. A business process can be decomposed into several sub-processes, which have their own attributes, but also contribute to achieving the goal of the super-process. The analysis of business processes typically includes the mapping of processes and sub-processes down to activity level. Activities are parts of the business process that do not include any decision making and thus are not worth decomposing (although decomposition would be possible), such as "Answer the phone", "produce an invoice".» A business process is a systematic approach of the enterprise, where its activities are examined as revenue generating and value adding transformations of...
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...CHAPTER 1 The importance of understanding consumer behaviour CHAPTER CONTENTS Introduction Defining Consumer Behaviour Consumer Behaviour in Context Consumer Behaviour and the Marketing Mix Consumers and Relationship Marketing Consumers and Marketing Planning Antecedents of Consumer Behaviour Neuroscience Psychology Sociology Summary Key points Review questions Case study revisited: Pizza Case study: Center Parcs Further reading References LEARNING OBJECTIVES After reading this chapter you should be able to: Explain how the study of consumer behaviour has evolved. Show how consumer behaviour relates to marketing decision-making. Explain why relationships are harder to establish in business-to-consumer situations than in business-to-business situations. Describe the scope and nature of psychology and sociology. Describe the scope and nature of anthropology. Describe the relationship of economics with the study of consumer behaviour. Explain the role of exchange in improving people’s welfare. Explain how the terms ‘luxury’ and ‘necessity’ relate to consumer behaviour. Introduction Customer Someone who makes the decision to buy a product 01-Blythe-Ch-01-Part-1.indd 3 Every day we buy things. We exchange our money for goods and services, for our own use and for the use of our families: we choose things we think will meet our needs on a day-to-day basis, and we occasionally make buying decisions which will affect our lives for ...
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...INTRODUCTION TO MACROECONOMICS E202 $ ¥ Dr. David A. Dilts Department of Economics Doermer School of Business and Management Sciences Indiana-Purdue University-Fort Wayne June 1, 1993 Revisions: May 1994, December 1995, July 1996, November, 2000, May 2003, May 2006 PREFACE This Course Guide was developed in part because of the high cost of college textbooks, and in part, to help organize students’ studying by providing lecture notes together with the reading assignments. This Guide is provided to the student online at the Department of Economics website. Jayla Heller, the Department’s secretary has been kind enough to go through all of the frustration and hard work to put the guide in the appropriate format and put it online. To her goes my gratitude. The department, neither school, nor the professor make anything whatsoever from this Guide. In fact, the department’s budget and the professor’s own resources are used in the writing of the Guide, and the numerous draft copies that are produced in the revisions of this document. Like the sign in the Mom and Pop bait shop on Big Barbee Lake says, “This is a non-profit organization, wasn’t planned to be – it just worked out that way.” Well, actually it was planned to be a non-profit enterprise in this case. The professor also wishes to acknowledge the fact that several students have proposed changes, improvements, caught errors, and helped to make this document more useful as a learning tool. Naturally, any errors of omission...
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...More Than a Numbers Game A Brief Histor y of Accounting Thomas A. King John Wiley & Sons, Inc. More Than a Numbers Game More Than a Numbers Game A Brief Histor y of Accounting Thomas A. King John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Thomas A. King. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability...
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...Hundreds(of(real(personal(accounts(of Group'Discussions'&'Personal'Interviews during(MBA(admissions(to(India’s(best(B9schools Written'by Compiled'by Loads'of'MBA'Aspirants The'PaGaLGuY'MadCapz'Group PaGaLGuY.com Antholo gy Hundreds of real personal accounts of Group Discussions and Personal Interviews during MBA admissions to India’s best business schools. In this edition: The IIMs at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Lucknow, Indore & Kozhikode. Written by Loads of MBA aspirants Compiled by The PaGaLGuY MadCapz Team PaGaLGuY GD-PI Anthology Copyright © 2011, PaGaLGuY.com All text and content in this document is solely owned by PaGaLGuY.com. Reproduction without permission in any form or means is illegal. Special copy prepared exclusively for mustafa rokerya Get your own Free personalized copy (with your name on it) of this book from http://www.pagalguy.com/books/ What this book is about What is a real IIM interview like? What kind of questions do they ask and what judgments do applicants have to make while answering them? Since 2003, those with real Group Discussion and Personal Interview calls from India’s top bschools have been posting entire and detailed transcripts of their admission interviews immediately after they happen, so that others slotted for later interviews can learn what GDPI is going to be like this year. This book is a collection of dozens of handpicked GDPI experiences from the country’s top bschools during the admission...
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