1) Here is a statement the county made last week.
Students and Parents,
This notification is to inform you of the latest
information released by the county regarding your child’s grade. As noted
from the district communication, students have a choice to accept their grades
as of March 13, 2020 as final grades for the 2019-2020 school year OR Continue
to earn grades for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year to improve their
grade(s). We want to clarify that if a student chooses not to
participate, perform or actively engage with his/her teacher(s) and they do not
take advantage of assignment opportunities, this will result in their final
grade being the grade that they had on March 13th. The only
way for the March 13th grade to improve is for the student to submit
assignments and participate in the digital learning opportunities made
available to him/her by the teacher.
2) Schedule Going Forward: Because of the county's new schedule for classes, we have to adjust our schedule. From now on, there will be no new work on Fridays. Instead Friday is for students to catch up. Thus in general we will now use the following schedule:
Mon: New Material
Tue: Work related to that material
Wed: New Material
Thu: Work related to that material
Fri: Student catch-up day.
3) Schedule for This week:
Mon: Monopolistic Competition and Oligopoly
Tue: Work on MC and Oli. Plus a Monopoly Graph Quiz
Wed: Game Theory
Thu: Work on Game Theory
Fri: Student catch-up day.
3) Tomorrow's Work: For those that want to get ahead, here is the worksheet for Tuesday.
4) Tomorrow's Quiz: There will be a quiz on reading monopoly graphs. I will post it tomorrow. It is NOT due tomorrow. You can turn it in whenever you finish it. It will essentially be like the worksheets that I have given you in the past about monopoly graphs. It is an open note quiz.
5) Zoom meeting: We will have our weekly Zoom meeting on Thursday at 10:00.
6) Test Corrections: As I said in a previous blog, I have a plan for test corrections but it requires me to go to my office at school. I had previously thought I would be able to get to my office on Tuesday (4/14), but I now am scheduled to be able to go there this Wednesday (4/15). Thus, I should be able to tell you something on Thursday.
7) Today's notes:
Today we are going to handle all of Monopolistic Competition. (Shortened to MC for the rest of this post.) We will also handle half of oligopoly. It sounds like a lot, but it will really be very easy.
Here’s the MC notes:
What makes MC so easy is that it acts exactly like either a monopoly or a PC firm. The only thing you have to remember is when it does each. Most of the time it is more like a monopoly. Nevertheless it IS NOT a monopoly. Remember the basic characteristics of MC:
- Lots of firms
- Selling nearly identical products
- Low barriers to entry
- Very small control over price
- Unless you can use non-price competition to convince customers otherwise. Then you gain lots of control over price.
Graphing MC is super easy because it is the same as monopoly. You still have the MR line lower than the DARP line. The only difference is that the MR line and the DARP lines tend to be flatter than a monopoly. This is because there are more firms in the market, thus there are substitute goods available. More substitutes means more elastic. More elastic means these lines are flatter.
In the short run a MC firm acts like a monopoly. That means we are still looking for MR=MC to determine our quantity. We still use the DARP line to determine whether we should shut down or stay open.
In the long run a MC firm acts like a PC firm. That means it will break even in the long run. This is for the same reason as a PC market. If the firms in a MC market are making a profit, in the long run, more firms will enter the market and drive the price down. This will continue until there is no longer a profit. If the firms in a MC market are losing money, in the long run, firms will leave the market. This will continue until the price rises back to where everyone left in the market is breaking even.
However it will be different from a PC firm in that it WILL NOT be at the bottom of the ATC curve. Like a monopoly the MC firms DARP line is sloping downward. This means there is no reason for the firm to ever produce at the bottom of the ATC. If it is breaking even, the DARP line will touch the side of the ATC curve. Like this:
Here are the Oligopoly notes:
Remember that an oligopoly is only a few firms. Usually we think of it being somewhere in the 2-4 range, though it could possibly be a little more than that.
Oligopolies are like MC in that they can be more like a PC market or more like a monopoly. It depends on how the firms decide to act.
If the firms in the oligopoly decide to compete against each other they will act like a MC market.
However, since there are so few firms, they could decide to work together and collude. If they do this, the firms are all working together and will effectively be a monopoly.
Graphing oligopolies is a giant mess. Because of that, we don’t worry about graphing individual firms for oligopoly. We can still have a graph for an oligopoly market because it is still your standard X market graph.
On Wednesday we will learn about Game Theory.
8) Questions?
If you have questions you can email me and ask them OR you can just wait and ask them during the Zoom meeting on Thursday.
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