Homework on Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets

The Excel workbook for this assignment is now available.  I'm sorry for the delay.  Please use the comments area for this post to ask questions about the homework.

My lessons learned/Decisions to be made going forward

I think it is somewhat ironic that we talked in class yesterday about things going wrong and then finding somebody to blame with that preceding almost immediately several students struggling with the homework because they put in numerical values rather than cell references, and then some of those students sending messages of irritation along with their submission key.

I wonder whether those students completed the Demo for Homework that we went over in class during the second week of the course.  There were exercises in that Demo specifically about this issue.  From where I sit either (1) I should have required everybody to do that and submit their result or (2) some people who did that nonetheless didn't take the lesson from it, so the demo needs to be redesigned.  I would appreciate getting comments on this as I really don't know what the explanation is for you.  If you prefer putting that in an email to me to further protect your privacy, that would be fine too.

I trust that on future homeworks students will use cell references so this issue, painful as it was this time around, will be behind us.  The next issue for me in designing the homework is whether on the math itself I'm spoon feeding you the answers too much and that it would be better for your learning if I didn't do that from here on out.  I get that the comfort with the math is somewhat heterogeneous in our class and some may prefer to leave as is.  I welcome your opinion on this issue too.

Let me say how the issue looks from where I sit.  There is an old idea of how students do math homework called "plug and chug" where students take an already given formula and plug in values into that.  It is a path to generate an answer without getting understanding about why the formula is useful.    So I'd like to steer students away from plug and chug  and am looking for suggestions on how to do it.

Doing the third worksheet in the homework

After class today some students came up to me and said they were having trouble with the homework, the part where there is transfer pricing but also an external market.

I just tried it and it is fine as is.  But I also tried to replicate the error and I think I did that.  The problem is that there is a price in cell F255.  You see a number with two decimals, but you were instructed in the tutorial not to trust what you see but rather to use the cell reference.  See if that works for you.

(I'm placing the same message as a comment here.)

Use this for homework 2 questions and comments

The second Excel homework is due this Thursday evening.  If you have questions or comments about the assignment please put them as commnets to this post.

Issues with doing the homework reported by students

At this point seven students have done the homework and submitted their key via the Web form.  This to show that for those who have yet to have done so, it is do-able.  But it seems there are a variety of stumbling blocks, so I'd like to list them here and give my best guess as to how to resolve them.

Downloading the File

I have been getting some requests to share the file.  They are unnecessary.  All the homeworks are made publicly available.  There *may* be an issue that if you are logged into Google Apps with your Campus account then it won't let you access it because this lies outside the Campus Google Apps.  I'm not sure on this.  I can't test whether it is true or not.  But the simple solution is to do as follows.

Don't be logged into anything.  Click the link to go to the page with the File.  Then go to the File menu and Download it.  You must use real Excel to do this homework.  You can't do it in Google Spreadsheet.

Doing Computations

Some of you have been trained to do arithmetic and algebra on a calculator.  That is okay for figuring out the solution to a question.  But when you enter the solution do the computation in Excel.  Don't enter an approximate solution.  It will say it is incorrect.  Do the calculation precisely.

Working the Algebra

Some students have struggled a little with finding a P.O. allocation in the Edgeworth Box, the homework says this requires a little algebra.  This is where doing the homework with a classmate can help - they can explain what they did.  Or you can post questions to the class site.

After the fact you need to feel comfortable with the algebra.  I expect that in our review tomorrow, students who struggled will ask questions.  That's the point of the activity.  Do note that the midterms will take problems to work from the homework.

First Homework on Efficiency/Using Pencil and Paper?

I have turned off  Moderation on the blog.  I'll leave it that way as along as we don't get a lot of spam. If the spam does come will go to Plan B.  (At the moment, I don't have Plan B.)

Use this post to ask questions you have about doing the first homework.  Do so in the comments area for this post.  For each subsequent homework, I will make a post so you can ask questions on that particular assignment.  As I said in class yesterday, other students are free to respond to those questions.  It would be good for you to do that.  Sometimes students understand better than the instructor the difficulty encountered and the work around they found.

In the demo yesterday, I showed that there are blank cells for you to do "scratch work" as you complete your assignment.  But many people are more comfortable with a pencil and paper, writing out what needs to be solved, drawing a diagram, or working an equation.  So I encourage you to find an approach that fits the way you think.

I am curious about that so perhaps after the or third homework, when a routine has been established, I will poll the class about how each of you go about doing this.