Blog | Recent Posts
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Natural Monopoly And The Beer Store
A natural monopoly occurs when an industry gives the best social outcome if it is run by a single firm. For instance, building two railways lines to a small town wastes resources. the two lines, therefore, don’t increase public welfare. What can we say about natural monopoly and the Beer Store? The Problem Of Monopoly…
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The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality
Joshua Greene uses the Tragedy of Common Sense Morality as a central theme in his book — Moral Tribes. His suggests that our brains are actually surprisingly well adapted to solve the tragedy of the commons. In the tragedy of the commons, our personal incentives to behave uncooperatively cause disaster for everyone. Greene calls this…
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Dimensions of Morality
Jonathan Haidt believes he can bring people of different political approaches together. To do this it is important to understand the dimensions of morality. Understanding Others Haidt’s is an admirable goal. He is surely right when he notes that differences are not simply because “some people are good and others evil” (Haidt, 2012, page 370).…
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Variety Seeking And Halloween Candy
Variety Seeking Behavior Has A Large Literature My Halloween post is about variety seeking. This is an active topic in consumer psychology. There is a strain of research that asks why some people embrace variety more than others. I generally am less excited by work on the stable differences between people, traits. People do differ…
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More On Evaluating Student Evaluations
Today’s piece has more on evaluating student evaluations. Braga, Paccagnella, and Pellizari’s (2014) article is a useful contribution to the debate about student evaluations. The Challenge Of Evaluating Evaluations This research does have limitations. For example, it is based on one school. Furthermore, the very strength of the article (random assignment of students to classes)…
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Evaluating Evaluations Of Evaluations
Stark and Freishat (2014) are pretty negative about student evaluations of teaching. To be fair the more you study evaluations the more problems you see. I agree that we have a problem with bias in student evaluations of teaching. Still many of the criticisms of evaluations, however, seem to be about the general problems of…
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Primary Election Strategy
I find primary elections endlessly fascinating. Partly because the decision is so tricky. We rarely have enough information to make an ideal choice, Yet, people still develop very strong opinions. In the 2008 Democratic primary it was hard to see significant policy differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. That didn’t stop intense arguments. What…
