Richard B. McKenzie

and other pricing puzzles

Why popcorn costs so much at the movies

Dwight R. Lee

This is the first textbook in microeconomics written exclusively for MBA students. McKenzie/Lee minimizes attention to mathematics and maximizes attention to intuitive economic thinking. The text is structured clearly and accessibly: Part I of each chapter outlines the basic theory and Part II applies this basic theory to management issues. 'Perspective' sections in each chapter provide a new line of argument or different take on a business or policy issue, and carefully chosen topics and review questions are designed to spark lively and instructive debates. Throughout the book, McKenzie and Lee aim to infuse students with the economic way of thinking in the context of a host of problems that MBA students, as future managers of real-world firms, will find relevant to their career goals.

The Economic Way of Thinking for Managers

Microeconomics for MBAs

This work offers an unconventional but empirically grounded argument in favour of market monopolies.

How Market Power Fosters Creative Production

In Defense of Monopoly

Why is that in the land of the free, special interests control what you eat, wear, and drive, while the government tells you how your children will be educated and how much you'll pay for life's essentials? In Bound To Be Free—a book as clear and direct as it is powerful and persuasive—noted economist Richard B. McKenzie identifies the forces destroying you bit by bit and shows what can be done now to stop the erosion of individual and marketplace freedom before it is too late! In a daring departure, McKenzie argues that the key to each person's freedom is a business community free of government favor as well as interference. Only a reassertion of the principles of constitutional democracy will really speak to the people's deeply felt need to "get the government off our backs." Citing case after case, McKenzie demonstrates that the root problem is that everyone but the ultimate consumer is paying the "economy-by-government game." Bound To Be Free goes beyond a tough objective delineation of our economic malaise. It provides a hard-hitting, multifaceted program that includes a free market constitutional amendment, and enforceable way to limit the government's ability to levy taxes and print money, and a novel procedure to eliminate the control of Congress by special interests. The result is a message of hope and freedom for all Americans.

Bound to Be Free

Gordon Tullock

The New World of Economics, 6th edition, by Richard McKenzie and Gordon Tullock, represents a revival of a classic text that, when it was first published, changed substantially the way economics would be taught at the introductory and advanced levels of economics for all time. In a very real sense, many contemporary general-audience economics books that seek to apply the “economic way of thinking” to an unbounded array of social issues have grown out of the disciplinary tradition established by earlier editions of The New World of Economics. This new edition of The New World will expose new generations of economics students to how McKenzie and Tullock have applied in a lucid manner a relatively small number of economic concepts and principles to a cluster of topics that have been in the book from its first release and to a larger number of topics that are new to this edition, with the focus of the new topics on showing students how economic thinking can be applied to business decision making. This edition continues the book’s tradition of taking contrarian stances on important economic issues. Economics professors have long reported that The New World is a rare book in that students will read it without being required to do so.

A Remake of a Classic for New Generations of Economics Students

The New World of Economics

Mainstream economists everywhere exhibit an "irrational passion for dispassionate rationality." Behavioral economists, and long-time critic of mainstream economics suggests that people in mainstrean economic models "can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the will power of Mahatma Gandhi," suggesting that such a view of real world modern homo sapiens is simply wrongheaded. Indeed, Thaler and other behavioral economists and psychology have documented a variety of ways in which real-world people fall far short of mainstream economists' idealized economic actor, perfectly rational homo economicus. Behavioral economist Daniel Ariely has concluded that real-world people not only exhibit an array of decision-making frailties and biases, they are "predictably irrational," a position now shared by so many behavioral economists, psychologists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists that a defense of the core rationality premise of modedrn economics is demanded.

In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics

Predictably Rational?

This book argues that Lionel Robbins’s construction of the economics field’s organizing cornerstone, scarcity—and all that has been derived from it from economists in Robbins’s time to today—no longer can generate general consent among economists. Since Robbins’ Essay, economists have learned more than Robbins and his cohorts could have imagined about human decision making and about the human brain that is the lynchpin of human decision making. This book argues however that behavioral economists and neuroeconomists, in pointing to numerous ways people fall short of perfectly rational decisions (anomalies, biases, and downright errors), have saved conventional economics from such self-contradictions in what could be viewed as a wayward approach. This book posits that the human brain is the ultimate scarce resource, and that a focus on the brain can bring a new foundation for economics and can save the discipline from hostile criticisms from a variety of non-economists (many psychologists).

A Proposed Reconciliation between Neoclassical and Behavioral Economics

A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science

The textbook that develops the economic way of thinking through problems that MBA students will find relevant to their career goals. Theory and math is kept as simple as possible and illustrated with real-life scenarios. This textbook package includes online video tutorials on key concepts and complex arguments, and topics likely to be assessed in exams. The distinguished author team has developed this textbook over 20 years of teaching microeconomics to MBA students. Chapters are clearly structured to support learning: Part I of each chapter develops key economic principles. Part II draws on those principles to discuss organizational and incentive issues in management and focuses on solving the 'principal-agent' problem to maximize the profitability of the firm – lessons that can be applied to problems MBAs will face in the future. Economics and management are treated equally; this unique textbook presents economics as part of the everyday thinking of business people.

This entertaining book seeks to unravel an array of pricing puzzles from the one captured in the book’s title to why so many prices end with "9" (as in $2.99 or $179). Along the way, the author explains how the 9/11 terrorists have, through the effects of their heinous acts on the relative prices of various modes of travel, killed more Americans since 9/11 than they killed that fateful day. He also explains how well-meaning efforts to spur the use of alternative, supposedly environmentally friendly fuels have starved millions of people around the world and given rise to the deforestation of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Richard B. McKenzie

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