Team B Learning Team

Team B Learning Team – Week 2

Team B met on April 7, 2012 to discuss the objectives for week two: identifying production levels to maximize profits, explain how to balance fixed and variable costs, and apply economic cost concepts in making business decisions. During our discussion, we discussed topics we felt comfortable with, topics we struggled with, and how the topics relate to our fields.

Topics comfortable with

The topics covered in the week two materials that our team felt comfortable with included fixed and variable costs as each team member has had experience with his or her employer, focusing on reducing costs. When discussed how fixed and variable costs are balanced, we also talked about how costs can be manipulated. From this our discussion led to the point made by the professor that each American President designates a new economist with each presidency, which affects the economic focus. We further talked about how numbers can be manipulated, such as in the census example in our recent class.

We also talked about those concepts that we were familiar with the marginal product and marginal cost from our prior quantitative reasoning class and how they relate to maximizing profits. We discussed the importance of balancing employee costs with resource costs.

Finally, we talked about how to apply the economic costs concepts in making business decisions including several economic costs definitions and theories.

Topics not comfortable with:

Among our team members, we had a general consensus that though most of the theories made sense, we all recognized the need to re-familiarize ourselves with the numerous theories throughout the chapters, such as law of diminishing returns; the MES scale and cost curve (why do they need to be identified before you can set the point for equilibrium); short and long term equilibrium; labor and demand terms (making decisions on increasing productivity such as overtime to achieve results) with the overall objective to...