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发信人: kuangshui ((▄︻┻┳═一)), 信区: Postgraduate
标 题: How to Build an Economic Model in Spare Time1
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Sat Mar 25 23:00:39 2006), 站内
How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time
Hal R. Varian
Most of my work in economics involves constructing theoretical models.
Over the years, I have developed some ways of doing this that may be
worth describing to those who aspire to practice this art. In reality the
process is much more haphazard than my description would suggest---
the model of research that I describe is an idealization of reality, much
like the economic models that I create. But there is probably enough
connection with reality to make the description useful---which I hope
is also true for my economic models.
1. Getting ideas
The first step is to get an idea. This is not all that hard to do. The tricky
part is to get a good idea. The way you do this is to come up with lots and
lots of ideas and throw out all the ones that aren't good.
But where to get ideas, that's the question. Most graduate students are
convinced that the way you get ideas is to read journal articles. But in
my experience journals really aren't a very good source of original ideas.
You can get lots of things from journal articles---technique, insight, even
truth. But most of the time you will only get someone else's ideas. True,
they may leave a few loose ends lying around that you can pick up on, but
the reason they are loose is probably that the author thought about them a
while and couldn't figure out what to do with them or decided they were
too tedious to bother with---which means that it is likely that you will find
yourself in the same situation.
My suggestion is rather different: I think that you should look for your ideas
outside the academic journals---in newspapers, in magazines, in conversations,
and in TV and radio programs. When you read the newspaper, look for the
articles about economic… and then look at the ones that aren't about
economics, because lots of the time they end up being about economics too.
Magazines are usually better than newspapers because they go into issues in
more depth.
On the other hand, a shallower analysis may be more stimulating: there's
nothing like a fallacious argument to stimulate research.*1
Conversations, especially with people in business, are often very fruitful.
Commerce is conducted in many ways, and most of them have never been
subjected to a serious economic analysis. Of course you have to be careful
not to believe everything you hear---people in business usually know a set
of rules that work well for running their own business, but they often have
no idea of where these rules come from or why they work, and this is really
what economists tend to find interesting.
In many cases your ideas can come from your own life and experiences. One
of my favorite pieces of my own work is the paper I wrote on ''A Model of
Sales''. I had decided to get a new TV so I followed the ads in the newspaper
to get an idea of how much it would cost. I noticed that the prices fluctuated
quite a bit from week to week. It occurred to me that the challenge to
economics was not why the prices were sometimes low (i.e., during sales) but
why they were ever high. Who would be so foolish as to buy when the price
was high since everyone knew that the item would be on sale in a few weeks?
But there must be such people, otherwise the stores would never find it
profitable to charge a high price. Armed with this insight, I was able to
generate a model of sales. In my model there were two kinds of consumers:
the ads. The stores had sales in order to price discriminate between the
informed and uninformed consumers.
Once I developed the model I had a research assistant go through a couple of
years' worth of the Ann Arbor News searching for the prices of color TVs.
Much to my delight the general pattern of pricing was similar to that
predicted by the model. And, yes, I did manage to get a pretty good deal on
the TV I eventually bought.
--
又一村102
※ 修改:·kuangshui 于 Mar 25 23:16:10 修改本文·[FROM: 192.168.86.1]
※ 来源:·荔园晨风BBS站 bbs.szu.edu.cn·[FROM: 192.168.86.1]
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