Econ 172

Spring 2006

Homework 1 Due Wednesday Jan 25

First part of the assignment: Join the econ172 class listserv:
 To do this, send email to listserv@list.uvm.edu and place a subscribe command,

sub econ172 your_name_here

in the body of the message. 
  Replace "your_name_here" with your first and last name, for example:

        sub econ172 Alan Greenspan

You will receive an email from the server with instructions. This will be a way for you to contact everyone in class and for me to contact you.

Written part of the homework:

1. Use supply-and-demand graphs to explain why parking is free at the suburban shopping mall but one typically must pay to park when shopping downtown.

2. During the winter of 1997-1998, the northeastern United States experienced warmer than usual conditions. The price of home heating oil was less than it was during the previous winter, but people bought less home heating oil. This contradicts the Law of Demand. True or false and why.

3. Because people prefer name-brand pain-relieving drugs over store-brand pain-relieving drugs, demand curves do not slope downward for pain-relieving drugs. True or false and why.

3. In the early 1990s the world price of coffee was high. Today it is much lower. Before 1994, Vietnam was a negligible producer of coffee. Today it produces 14 million pounds annually, second to Brazil’s 42 million pounds. Show what happened to the world coffee market using a supply and demand diagram.

In the text, chapter 2, answer questions 1, 4, 6, and 11 and problems 19, 21 and 22.