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  3. Microeconomists are on the march, winning top awards, helping battle the crisis, and advising the world’s most innovative firms.

Microeconomists are on the march, winning top awards, helping battle the crisis, and advising the world’s most innovative firms.

admin2018-06-06  18
问题     Microeconomists are on the march, winning top awards, helping battle the crisis, and advising the world’s most innovative firms. This week the trend continued, with the Nobel Prize going to two micro-economists. Why are they doing so well?
    First up, microeconomists seem to be very good at building new findings on old foundations. Take the Nobel Prize, covered by a colleague in the Free exchange print article—Game, set and match—this week. The prize went to economists who built on cooperative game theory, an ancient development by economic standards (one of the main papers was published in 1962). Cooperative game theory looks at how well people can do when acting together; by examining all the possible combinations, theorists can spot outcomes that individuals acting alone cannot achieve. They then focus on something called the "core" of the game—those outcomes that are "stable" in the sense that no subgroup would do better by breaking away and acting alone. But the theory is pivotal in understanding how to set up medical job-matching system in a stable way so that no hospital or medical school wants to break off and set up alone. Cooperative game theory is still being used in cutting edge auction design.
    And the Nobel is just one example of real-life problems solved by micro. A thoroughly macroeconomic problem—unconventional monetary policy—is another. In 2007 and 2008, central banks and finance ministries decided that it was a good idea to follow this policy which involves exchanging good assets (cash or treasury bills, for example) for illiquid ones. But working out exactly how to do it was a very different question. One major stumbling block was to work out what price to pay for the bad assets: markets were thinly traded and prices often did not exist.
    Micro theorists came up with the answers. In America, various academics advised the US Treasury in 2008. But the best example of micro in action is Britain, where the Bank of England uses a new type of auction—the Product Mix auction—designed by Paul Klemperer. The Bank’s Governor, Sir Mervyn King, clearly finds micro theory useful:
    There is an important lesson about making cutting edge economics accessible here. Auction theory uses very tough mathematics to grind out results. But micro theorists also work hard on the intuition for their work. As an example, the results from Mr Klemperer’s auction can be set out in a simple graphical format. This means non-specialists (like central bank governors) can access it easily, making it much more useful in policy settings. In macroeconomics, the opposite seems to be true: the maths is actually easier, but it is just hard enough to exclude non-specialists, and this shields models from popular scrutiny.
    Micro has made big recent developments in much more familiar areas too, including how we should think about the economics of Facebook, stock exchanges, newspapers and money. These are all platforms or intermediaries that link two types of user (Facebook connects users and advertisers, exchanges connect buyers and sellers). The economics of these platforms has spawned a new branch of micro, first developed by Jean Tirole and Jean Charles-Rochet in the early 2000s.
    These types of new insight explain why leading academic microeconomics are also top advisers at innovative technology firms. Hal Varian, probably the world’s best known microeconomist, is also the top economist at Google. Granted, this happens with banks and business-school academics too, but in microeconomics the "real world" experience seems to be nourishing the discipline in a way that is less clear in macro.
    A final strength may come from geographic diversity. In micro, while American universities lead the field, there are lots of other world-class hubs too. Macroeconomics, by comparison, is an all-American affair. Maybe this means a more diverse set of ideas about how firms, consumer and markets work are being brought to academic work in micro. Whatever the reason, microeconomists are on the up.
What does the phrase "grind out" (Line 2, Para. 5) mean?
选项 A、Search something with perseverance.
B、Achieve something with certainty.
C、Produce something with difficulty.
D、Deliver something with efficiency.
答案C
解析 语义理解题。根据题干提示定位到第五段。该段指出标售理论需要使用晦涩难懂的数学公式，所以要得出结果必然不易，即需要费力得出，故C项为正确答案。A项“坚持不懈地探索某物”，B项“确信无疑可获得某物”和D项“高效率地实现某物”均不符合原文意思，故均排除。
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