Weekly Roundup: From Robot Servers to Shrimp Farmers

Our everyday economics includes wages, externalities, productivity, income, tradeoff, taxes, fiscal policy, gender, human capital and comparative advantage.

Why Ronald McRobot Will Soon Serve Us

A minimum wage hike causes labor intensive fast food restaurants to exit the market, capital intensive restaurants to enter and the number of jobs to drop.

A New Message From Starbucks

Worried about losing sales to upscale brands, Starbucks is using competitive strategies to increase demand from affluent customers.

Weekly Roundup: From Fed Humor to the Wisdom of Warren Buffett

Our Posts Roundup Sunday 3.01.15 Handy notes from Warren Buffett…more Monday 3.02.15 The basics of Greek tax evasion…more Tuesday 3.03.15 Insight about airline queues…more Wednesday 3.04.15 Why we subsidize Brazilian farmers…more Thursday 3.05.15 What an ATM can teach us…more  …

Weekly Roundup: From Drinking Behavior to Dating Decisions

This week’s everyday economics involved 6 economists and such ideas as product differentiation, behavioral economics, marginal utility, price and trade.

Why We Should Look More Closely At the Size of Our Soda

The 6-ounce bottle of Coke was the king of soda when an upstart company called Pepsi-Cola sold a 12-ounce bottle for the same price. The year was 1934 and the price was 5 cents. Pepsi’s competitive strategy has been called brilliant because its biggest costs were advertising, bottling…

Starbucks Drive-Through Economics

My new Starbucks has a drive-through. If you look at a high shelf near the window through which the baristas hand the coffee and food to drivers, you see a screen with little cars and numbers. Changing from green to yellow…