To estimate beta, regulators and practitioners typically select a peer group of comparable firms whose stock is traded on financial markets. Modern macroeconomists frequently cite Frank Ramsey's () formulation of the optimal savings problem in which an economy-wide utility function is maximized. financial and real economy. Monetary and Economic Department function is more descriptive than predictive. In β. +. ∆ β. +. ∆ β. +. ⎟. ⎠. ⎞. ⎜. ⎝. ⎛. Using a Cobb-Douglas production function to model professional golf Professional golf is an interesting case study beta golf economic funtion sports economics as there are numerous.
But a model of a triangle for example, a diagram or a manipulable object cannot be ideal in the same way. It will be imperfect; its sides for example, not being straight except within some limits of approximation. And it will be particular: it must have definite angles and lengths of sides. Such a model functions as an idealization only under some self-denying ordinances or interpretive protocols that eschew conclusions that depend on the particular, non-ideal features.
The relationship between the model triangle and the ideal triangle suggests another form of idealization that we might call substantive idealization. Galilean idealizations are substantive in that they amount to isolating causal mechanisms from disturbing casual influences to exhibit their operation in a pure form McMullin ; Cartwright , ch.
But sometimes we know only phenomenal, not theoretical, relationships, which are used instrumentally to eliminate causal disturbances. Other times we appeal to general strategies of isolation such as shielding or randomization that we believe will eliminate a range of non-specific disturbances. At all times, we simply hope that our substantive idealizations have not left out any important, but unknown, disturbing factor.
While formal idealization is a matter of theoretical structure, the promise of substantive idealizations is that they might be quantified and engaged with concrete situations e. Substantive idealization is correlative to approximation. A substantively idealized model is successful if it fits the data or predicts, or meets some other measure of differential empirical success, well enough within some acceptable limits of approximation, provided that its success is traceable to—that is, depends essentially on —the model.
The notion of dependency is fuzzy, since there are variations in the relationship that will be indistinguishable within any particular limits of approximation. Standard graduate textbooks in macroeconomics are not usually methodologically self-conscious. They may nonetheless provide an implicit argument in support of microfoundations.
We have already seen that, without further defense, such a model provides an unattractive account of microfoundations. Yet, in later chapters, Blanchard and Fisher provide alternative models, ostensibly grounded in individual agents. To the extent that such models are successful and do not contradict the conclusions of representative-agent models, they constitute both successful microfoundations and a defense of the representative-agent model.
Since these models, do not in fact characterize each and every agent in an economy, they are best understood as employing a strategy of idealization. We now examine the nature of those idealizations, arguing that they are ultimately unsuccessful, so that they do not provide—and a fortiori representative-agent models do not provide—workable microfoundations for macroeconomics.
Popper was fully aware that this was an idealization in the sense that actual agents deviated from the analysis frequently. Historically, rational economic man was regarded not as a true description, but as an idealization. Beta golf economic funtion Mill, Jevons, and Marshall all recognized a hierarchy of human motives or values, of which they saw the economic as being the lowest, but also the broadest and most pervasive.
While they did not use the terminology of idealization, they nevertheless saw constrained-optimization as a substantive idealization. It captured a real tendency in human behavior, which dominated but did not completely determine, certain individual and social outcomes. Reasoning based on such a pervasive motive was, therefore, a good enough approximation for many purposes and many circumstances.
On the one hand, because it is an idealization, this definition limits the claims for precision in economic explanation. On the other hand, because it defines the field, any microfoundational strategy must in some sense be compatible with it. A major appeal of representative-agent and other similar microfoundational models is that they explicitly respect this constraint.
The centrality of the constrained-optimization idealization explains the persistent urge to discover the microfoundations of macroeconomics. Blanchard and Fischer , ch. In the interest of pedagogical clarity, their account is schematic, omitting many details that may be repaired in obvious ways. The primary example of such an idealization is the form of competition, which is treated in nearly every microeconomics textbook.
Consider the sole producer of a good a monopolist. The monopolist faces the entire market demand and to maximize profits chooses a price or a quantity to produce one implies the other as a function of demand that balances the increase in net revenue per unit as prices rise against the fall in the number of units sold. If we consider two or more producers duopoly or oligopoly of the same type of good, we introduce the problem of their interaction—the optimal behavior of each depends on the choices of the others.
To reach any definitive conclusion, some assumption about how producers behave in oligopolistic situations is introduced. Rather they are particular, non-ideal features similar to the particular angles that must be incorporated into a manipulable model triangle. Once in place, however, they may help sustain idealization.
Producers are then seen as infinite in number and infinitely small relative to the market. Monopolistic competition differs from perfect competition in that goods are seen as multidimensional, so that they may have features in common with other goods and yet have other features that make them distinct.
Different brands of beer, for instance, are similar and, in that respect, compete with other brands; yet Heineken is unique in its particular formulation, and the Heineken company is the sole purveyor monopolist of the brand. Monopolistic competition is the analogue of perfect competition when goods have this multidimensional form: each producer is a monopolist of its own particular good, which nevertheless competes with other related goods.
Under perfect competition, any price above the market price would result in no sales; while any price below the market price would capture all market demand albeit selling at a loss. In contrast, under monopolistic competition, consumers may not go for the cheapest good: it may be worth paying more for a Heineken than a Miller Lite—the two brands are imperfect substitutes.
Indeed, a consumer may diversify consumption according to the interaction of strength of relative preference and price. So, like a monopolist, the producer must set its price to balance the gains of higher prices to unit revenue against the losses of reduced demand. The assumption of price-taking is given up in favor of price-setting, even though the producer remains small relative to the market.
Monopolistic competition can be seen as a less idealized model than perfect competition. If we could give a measure of the differentia among goods, then perfect competition would be the Nowakian limit case in which the differences among goods approached zero. We now turn to the roles perfect competition and monopolistic competition, among other idealizations, in the reductions of macroeconomics to microeconomics.
The first step in their reduction is the idealization that goods are identical in production technology, yet are multidimensional in a way that makes them imperfect substitutes. For example, every type of beer might use the same brewing technology and have the same unit costs of production, even though their recipes differed so that each appealed to some customers more than others.
The identicalness of goods on the dimension relevant to production can be seen as a Nowakian idealization, like the analogous assumption of identical firms in the microeconomic model of perfect competition. Many of the key issues of macroeconomics are captured in the next step. Individual preferences are given by a utility function of the form:. The particular functional forms of Eqs.
These forms are chosen not as Nowakian idealizations of some actual preference function but as tractable forms with well-known mathematical properties, some of which may be adjusted to approximate features of actual preferences. They are then stipulated, non-ideal characteristics particular concretizations of the model.
As such, they function like concrete models of triangles see Sect. Each of these assumptions may be regarded as a pedagogical trick, which helps to make the model more tractable, but which in principle could be relaxed or replaced with a more empirically relevant assumptions in straightforward ways.
They do not seem to raise special problems for the project of microfoundations. The model is closed by treating agents as maximizing 3 subject to a budget constraint:. Equation 6 says that income I i consists of the value of what agents sell P i Y i plus the money they start with and that income is in turn divided between money spent on individual goods P j C ij and money saved M i.
From this optimization problem, Blanchard and Fischer are able to derive demands for each good and for holdings of money for each consumer and the supply of each good for each individual producer—each as a function of the price of goods relative to the general price level P.
A systemic solution can be viewed in two ways. First, as a general equilibrium, the model can be solved for a set of prices that makes the supply and demand for each good and for money equal, taking all agents into account. This is a quintessentially microeconomic solution. The actual derivation rests on symmetry. Equation 5 then guarantees that the price of each individual good and the general price level are identical, so that all relative prices are unity.
A second way to view the solution calculates various aggregates. Nominal aggregate demand for goods Y is by definition the sum over all goods and agents of the value of desired consumption, and is converted to a real value by deflating by the general price level:. Making use of the forms of the individual demand functions not shown , the equality of aggregate demand and output, and the symmetry of prices implying that relative prices are unity allows the derivation of aggregate demand functions in which no individual prices appear—for the output of goods:.
In conjunction with the definition of the price level P , an aggregate supply function relates the price level to the supply of money:. Together the macroeconomic system 8 , 9 and 10 determine the principal aggregates in the economy. The macroeconomic description has supposedly been reduced to the microeconomic in that the macroeconomic system is derived directly from the microeconomic general equilibrium solution to Eqs.
Each of the macroeconomic variables is an aggregation of the microeconomic variables, and the functional forms of the macroeconomic relations are determined by the functional forms and parameters of the microeconomic relationships. Since idealizing assumptions were involved in the microeconomic model, the reduction is itself idealized. But the model is taken to be a starting point for a model that will concretize a sufficient number of these idealizations until it will serve as a substantive idealization—in this case a model that provides a close enough approximation to the world that it can rationalize actual macroeconomic data.
One example of such improvability, one concretizing step, was the move from the idealization that all the goods are identical, giving a model of perfect competition, to one in which goods are distinct in a manner that supports monopolistic competition. Won a bet hit golf ball on frozen lake Later in the same lecture, Blanchard and Fischer further concretize the ideal assumption of perfectly flexible prices with assumptions about the costs of price setting that result in models in which prices adjust slowly to shocks to the system e.
Whether the model is sufficiently concretized on these dimensions is not an a priori conceptual matter, but a matter for empirical investigation and resolution. The reduction nonetheless involves two steps that do raise conceptual difficulties. The first is reflected in the utility function Eq. The microreduction views this step as a way of capturing the insight that coordination among agents is essential to macroeconomics.
In their formulation, part of the coordination is guaranteed through collapsing the decisions of some firms and consumers typically different agents in the real economy into a single optimization problem. Yet there is less here than meets the eye. The model can be viewed as a Nowakian idealization of a Walrasian general-equilibrium model in which producers and consumers are all separate agents.
Even at this disaggregated extreme, a genuine coordination problem fails to arise. To see this, consider the perfectly competitive, rather than the monopolistically competitive, case. Here we can push the idealization further and collapse the individual agents into a single, representative agent. The coordination issue is then eliminated, since the economy is governed by a single optimization problem.
This is clearly unattractive and accounts for our dismissing the representative-agent model in the first case. But is the general-equilibrium extreme any better. Individual agents, solving individual optimization problems provide part of the coordination. They do not, however, provide all of it. In the idealization, the agents are price-takers, each too small to affect the market on its own.
Somehow their choices must be made mutually consistent. The explicit mechanism is that they face a set of common prices, and those prices are adjusted until excess supplies and demands are eliminated. The explicitly modeled agents set quantities in response to market prices, but who sets market prices?
And on the basis of what knowledge. Economic theorists offer two approaches to these questions. First, sometimes they simply abstract away from the process of price setting and focus only on the equilibrium states, asserting that they exist and that comparisons among equilibria are the salient ones, without considering how an equilibrium is established.
Equilibrium is deus ex machina. Nonetheless, even the mathematics of discovering equilibria in formal general-equilibrium models points to the character of the god in the machine. The existence of an equilibrium is proved by establishing that a general equilibrium model has a fixed point in a mapping which takes a set of prices, considers the excess demands in the economy at those prices, and sets a new set of prices calculated to reduce some of the excess demands.
A fixed point corresponds to the mapping not proposing any change in the prices, which can happen only when all excess demands are zero—a situation which defines the equilibrium. Footnote 7 The mathematics demonstrates that far from economizing on information, something in the economy must do the work of the mapping and process prices in response to all of the excess demands.
The second approach to price setting is to give the god in the machine a name. Beta golf economic funtion Rather—implicitly or explicitly—it is a particular, and particularly unhelpful, concretization, which suggests falsely that the best analogue to a decentralized economy is a command economy in which information is processed centrally. Unfortunately, our monotheistic coordinating god in the machine has simply assumed a polytheistic form.
The equilibrium value of the aggregate price level in Eq. Two things should be noted. The simplicity is deceptive, since it results from the assumption that all agents are identical. If that assumption were relaxed, then the parameters of every agent would show up in the analogue to This is obvious, since the monopolistic competitor sets prices on the basis of a demand curve for its product that depends on the demands of every consumer and the supply responses of all of its competitors.
Second, application of Eq. In fact, Eq. Footnote 8 The general price level is, thus, an irreducible macroeconomic quantity, which cannot be eliminated from the reduction in the sense that individual agents must refer to an aggregate—to the whole—in order to make their individual choices.
In fact, its units are not analogous to the units of any individual price. I have previously argued that the general price level is an emergent property of macroeconomic systems and ontologically distinct from, while nonetheless supervenient on, the prices of individual goods Hoover , b , ch.
Any objection to the auctioneer in the setting of perfect competition must be multiplied by n in the setting of monopolistic competition. Rather than isolating the essence of the coordination problem, the microreduction dissolves it with a particular assumption that amounts to assuming it away.
The situation is much the same as if we offered a figure as an idealized triangle, but neglected to give it three sides. The second conceptual difficulty of the microreduction concerns aggregation. Again, it helps to start with perfect competition. The assumption that agents are price takers and small relative to the market is a properly formulated Nowakian formal idealization and may, in practice, prove to be a useful substantive idealization.
In contrast, the argument that justifies the representative-agent assumption through an idealization in which general equilibrium stands at one limit and the representative-agent at the other introduces an improper idealization. The representative agent is—inconsistently—simultaneously the whole market and small relative to market.
The problem can be summed up by the question: with whom does the representative agent trade. Another aspect of the problem can be seen by noting that the acceptable idealization of perfect competition in microeconomics applies to markets for particular goods, while macroeconomics must somehow capture the economy as a whole.
This, as we have seen before, suggests that the idealization should start with a general equilibrium system in which there are many different goods. The model would then involve two idealizations. The first lets the number of distinct goods approach a limit at one. The second lets the diversity of types of agents approach a single type, while letting there still be n agents.
Aggregation might then appear simple. The aggregation would be justified if it yielded a good enough approximation for the purposes at hand. Economics textbooks not infrequently speak of such modeling assumptions—often referring to the single good as some ubiquitous commodity—e. As we have already noted in Sect.
The requirement of homotheticity is not a Nowakian idealization. It does not eliminate a substantive factor as inessential by setting it to a limit. Instead, it is a particular concrete assumption upon which the result critically depends. And it is not robust or an attractive prospect for a useful approximation.
View Economics Association website. FMA assists in the professional, educational, and social development of college students interested in finance, banking and investments. We participate in presentations, tours, seminars, financial calculator workshops, spreadsheet software classes, pizza parties, golf tournaments, and other social functions. See the Human Resource Management webpage here.
The ITM club is for all the diverse subgroups including cybersecurity, database and network management, data analytics, software development, and etc. Join the Professional Sales Team. You will gain confidence and skills in communication, persuasion, relationship building and more — skills you will need and use in any career and for the rest of your life.
We have get-togethers and host events such as workshops, company walk-throughs and sales training. We aim to make a student-to-corporate pipeline with local and national companies. We host sales career fairs for jobs and internships. We also participate in sales competitions across the U. Find us on Engage under Professional Selling Club. Net Impact Boise State University is an affiliate of an international organization consisting of undergraduate, graduate and professional level clubs throughout the world.
View the Net Impact website. Women in Business Association is focused on connecting women from the College of Business and Economics in a casual and fun way. A student run association, Women in Business strives to create a community where women can network, connect and build relationships that empower them in business and life.
Add Copyright Permission. Copyright Permission Qty:. Current Stock:. Quantity: Want to buy more than 1 copy. Buying for your team. See quantity pricing. This is a copyrighted PDF. Add copies before sharing with your team. Product : Pages: Related Topics: Incubators , Entrepreneurial financing , Entrepreneurial business strategy ,.
Summaries and excerpts of the latest books, special offers, and more from Harvard Business Review Press.