ECC1000 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Marginal Cost, Marginal Utility, Opportunity Cost

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Principle 3: Rational People Think at the Margin
The opportunity cost of an item is what you give up to get that item. When making any
decision, decision makers should be aware of the opportunity costs that accompany
each possible action.
Economists use the term marginal change to describe a small incremental adjustment
to an existing plan of action
A person’s willingness to pay for a good is based on marginal benefit that an extra unit
of the good would yield
The marginal benefit depends on how many units a person already has
A rational decision maker takes an action if and only if the marginal benefit of the
action exceeds the marginal cost
Chapter 2: Thinking Like an Economist
Economists make assumptions for the same reason: Assumptions can simplify the complex
world and make it easier to understand.
Economists use different assumptions to answer different questions.
Suppose that we want to study what happens to the economy when the government
changes the number of dollars in circulation. An important piece of this analysis, it
turns out, is how prices respond.
Many prices in the economy change infrequently; the newsstand prices of magazines,
for instance, change only once every few years.
Knowing this fact may lead us to make different assumptions when studying the effects
of the policy change over different time horizons.
Economic Models (page 22)
Economic models omit many details to allow us to see what is truly important
All models are built with assumptions
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