As Dina and Amy go searching for Bo, Amy notices that Dina doesn’t have a radio in her truck. It turns out that Dina special-ordered her truck without a radio (even though it costs more) because she believes it would make her truck less appealing to potential thieves. If criminals behave rationally (which Gary Becker argued that most do), a truck without a radio wouldn’t be worth the potential cost associated with car theft. Dina has removed the incentive to steal her truck.
Category: Other
When it comes to selecting numbers for a lottery, people tend to irrationally believe certain numbers are more important than others. Each number is just as likely to be selected as the other numbers, so placing a higher probability on one number being selected isn’t rational. Garret isn’t fooled, but he also isn’t fond of wasting his time watching others behave so irrationally.
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Winning the Lottery
What would you do if you won the lottery? This clip fits nicely with two different sections of an economics course. The first is how people respond to income increases in terms of purchasing normal goods or luxury goods. For labor economics, this discussion is a good segue to discussion how increases in income decrease the time people devote to work assuming leisure is a normal good.
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Picking Random Numbers
Cheyenne and Mateo are trying to pick numbers for the upcoming Missouri jackpot and are discussing how random their numbers are. While each combination is no more lucky than any other combination, there are particular numbers that people pick because they feel lucky. The odds of the lottery being 1-2-3-4-5 are just as likely as any other combination of five numbers, but the likelihood of sharing the jackpot with another person is probably pretty low.
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Election Day
It’s election day and Cloud 9 has placed pamphlets in the break room encouraging employees to vote for anti-union candidates. Cloud 9 knows that unionization could result in much higher labor costs, so they spend that money to encourage workers to not form a union. This form of managerial opposition is part of the explanation for the decline in unionization rates in the United States.
Teaching with Superstore 