Week 15 — Readings & Resources

Course: Principles of Microeconomics (ECON 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Kessler
Focus: Asymmetric Information, Behavioral Economics & Inequality · Objective 8

Everything below is a link to a free external resource — nothing is embedded, copied, or downloaded. Links were verified live at build time; if one ever rots, the per-term update re-checks them. (Canvas: a Page of links + ExternalUrl module items.)

📖 Read (≈25 min)

1. OpenStax, Principles of Microeconomics 3e — Ch. 16, "Information, Risk, and Insurance" (§16.1 The Problem of Imperfect Information; §16.2 Insurance and Imperfect Information)
   🔗 https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-microeconomics-3e
   Adverse selection, moral hazard, signaling, and how insurance markets manage information gaps. The chapter maps directly to the lemons problem we work in class and in the workshop.

2. OpenStax, Principles of Microeconomics 3e — Ch. 18, "Poverty and Economic Inequality" (§18.1 Measuring Income Inequality; §18.2 Causes of Income Inequality; §18.3 Government Policies to Reduce Income Inequality)
   🔗 https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-microeconomics-3e
   Quintile shares, the Lorenz curve, and the Gini coefficient — the measurement tools from the lecture. Read §18.1 carefully; §18.2–18.3 give the competing causal and policy perspectives.

3. Khan Academy — Microeconomics → "Informational asymmetries." Read Adverse selection and the lemons problem and Moral hazard.
   🔗 https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microeconomics
   Concise, worked, with practice questions on adverse selection vs. moral hazard timing.

▶️ Watch (≈15 min)

4. CrashCourse Economics #27 — "Behavioral Economics." (Adriene Hill & Jacob Clifford)
   🔗 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtPNZwz5_o_5uirJ8gQXnhEO
   Episode 27 of the playlist — loss aversion, anchoring, present bias, nudges. ~10 min. One of the best introductions to behavioral economics for principles students.

5. Marginal Revolution University (MRU) — "Asymmetric Information." Search the MRU microeconomics course for the asymmetric information unit.
   🔗 https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics
   Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok's treatment of the lemons problem and signaling — clean, short videos that reinforce the lecture math.

🛠️ Tools for this week (links only)

6. FRED — Federal Reserve Economic Data — for real income-distribution data (Gini coefficient, income shares by quintile for the United States over time).
   🔗 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
   Search "Gini coefficient" or "income share" to see real distributional data. Remember: the quintile table in class and in the workshop is an illustrative engineered example, not real-country data.

7. Desmos Graphing Calculator — useful if you want to sketch a Lorenz curve.
   🔗 https://www.desmos.com/calculator

Why these earn the click: OpenStax Ch. 16 is the backbone for the information section; Ch. 18 covers inequality measurement; CrashCourse #27 is the best short video on behavioral economics; MRU covers the lemons logic cleanly; FRED gives real distributional data to contrast with the illustrative workshop table.