• Regular standards on plagiarism are applicable to us. Be careful to credit your sources—always.

• There is no midterm for this class. This is not designed to make this course easier on you. In fact, it puts more responsibility on you to fulfill course requirements without the incentive of an exam grade.

• There will be a final exam. We will have a practice exam in the third or fourth week of November.

• Final course grades will be determined as follows:

3 November Personal Project--proposals, outlines, first drafts.

Presentation on Oligopoly.

10 November Case Study # 4. (Assignment below.)

Lecture on Resource Markets.

You have been given an example of a case study on Monopolistic Competition based on the U.S. Beer Industry. (Mansfield, Microeconomic Problems, pp. 153-158.) You are not asked to work through this case study. It is given to you as an example of a case study that you will design yourself.

Find a local company or industry—in Almaty or Kazakhstan or Central Asia--that is of interest to you. It might be the same company you wrote about for our assignment on privatization. Pick a single economic aspect of this industry and design questions and exercises that will highlight economic observations and analyses.

For example, Mansfield asks whether a letter written by Adolphus Busch to a competitor is representative of a monopolistically competitive firm. The question forces the student to carefully consider the characteristics of monopolistic competition, to learn about how it is an applicable and realistic model or not.

You might ask similar questions about non-price competition among taxi drivers in Almaty, or about the external costs of Soviet irrigation projects in Western Kazakhstan, or about elasticity of demand for antibiotics at the local pharmacy. Design simple questions as well—True-False, matching, graphing exercises. Try to be original. Make it fun.

Due 10 November.