Ch. 4 Reflection

In many large cities, you can now use your cell phone to call Uber or Lyft instead of hailing a taxi.  Would you expect this to affect the prices of taxi medallions (that is really the supply of taxis)?  Why or why not?  Talk about supply and demand curves in your answer. Make sure you can draw them! I would expect the price of taxi medallions to decrease as well as the supply of taxis because the demand for taxis will decrease. Fewer drivers will want to become Taxi drivers and instead, more drivers will decide to work for Lyft or Uber because the demand is higher. Because the demand for Lyft and Uber exceeds the current supply, there are market incentives in place to increase the supply of Uber and Lyft drivers.
Can you think of an example where you watched the supply of a good or service change rapidly?  (For example, a new hotel or restaurant opened.)  Based on the chapter what would you expect to see happen? Why? At the beginning of this ski season at Copper Mountain, the snow conditions were great, but the lifts at the resort were not all operating. This means that the demand to ski was high but the supply that Copper could transport skiers to the top of the mountain were low. This created a "shortage" where skiers chose to visit other resorts and Copper lost business and income potential.
Give another example of a concept from this chapter.  For example I used AirBnB to rent an apartment in San Francisco a few years ago.  How did AirBnB affect the supply of short term room rentals in San Francisco? How about the supply of long term rentals? In using your example, Airbnb increases the supply of short term rentals in SF, therefore, decreased the price of short term rentals. However, this also decreased the supply of long term rentals and most likely increase the cost of long term rentals as well. 

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