Exam 32: Building Theories to Explain Everyday Life From Observations to Questions to Theories to Predictions

Explain what it means to say that a theory is falsifiable or refutable? Give a specific example to help support your answer.

The efficient number of gifts that a gift-giver wants to give is the number at which the marginal benefits of giving a gift are__________________the marginal costs of giving a gift.

A theory is a perfect description of reality.

The _________________ the opportunity cost of bad behavior, the _________________ likely one is to exhibit bad behavior.

Theory B predicts that everything that happens, happens for a reason - although we may not know what the reason is. This theory

For every gift that A gives to B from the first to the tenth gift, A receives a net benefit of $10. The additional cost to A of giving an additional gift is constant at $5. It follows that A's marginal benefit curve for giving gifts to B is ___________________ (assuming that we place "marginal benefits" on the vertical axis and "number of gifts" on the horizontal axis).

In general, a dry cleaner in a small town is ______________ likely to be unethical in his business practices than a dry cleaner in a large city. This is because the larger a percentage of the population one person is, the _____________likely that person will have to further engage with people he encounters.

One theory discussed in the textbook is that there is a direct relationship between the opportunity cost of having children and the number of children a woman will have.

The larger the percentage of the population an individual person is, the ______________ likely that person will have to further engage with people she meets. This implies that she will generally be ____________ likely to behave unethically and poorly with the people in her town as the population of her town increases.

If a person gives a gift to another person, an economist would say that it is because

Theory A predicts that the higher the opportunity cost of having a child, the fewer children a woman will have. Which of the following is evidence against the theory if opportunity cost is measured in terms of foregone salary?

Anna gives Billy a gift of $200. We can be sure that Billy will

If a theory gives a scientist results that she does not want, then she should not believe in that theory.

People sometimes act differently in different settings. An economist is likely to explain this by saying

It often appears as if there are "too few" workers at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to service all of its customers at a given point in time. Based on one of theories discussed in the textbook, this is probably because

Universities A and B are substitutes in the minds of many college students. Initially the student tuition at each university is the same and far below the equilibrium tuition. Then, the tuition at A is raised and B is not. As a result of a rising tuition at A, some students who would have applied and enrolled in A, apply to B instead. Based on the logic presented in one of the theories discussed in the textbook, we would expect that

A gift-giver's efficient number of gifts (to give to a gift-recipient) has fallen from 10 to 8. This could be because

A theory predicts that all swans are white. A thousand people go out into the field and identify the color of the swans they see. Their results reveal that, of the 10,000 swans they saw, all were white. It follows that

Scientists prefer to advance irrefutable theories, rather than refutable theories.

In the burglary crime model presented in the textbook, as the anguish cost of committing a burglary rises, the prediction is that