Syllabi-Induced Tastes over Exam Grades: Suppose you are taking two classes, economics and physics. In both classes, only two exams are given during the semester.
A: Since economists are nice people, your economics professor drops the lower exam grade and bases your entire grade on the higher of the two grades. Physicists are another story. Your physics professor will do the opposite — he will drop your highest grade and base your entire class grade on your lower score.
(a) With the first exam grade (ranging from 0 to 100) on the horizontal axis and the second exam grade (also ranging from 0 to 100) on the vertical, illustrate your indifference curves for your physics class.
(b) Repeat this for your economics class.
(c) Suppose all you care about is your final grade in a class and you otherwise value all classes equally. Consider a pair of exam scores (x1, x2) and suppose you knew before registering for a class what that pair will be — and that it will be the same for the economics and the physics class. What must be true about this pair in order for you to be indifferent between registering for economics and registering for physics?
B: Consider the same scenario as the one described in part A.
(a) Give a utility function that could be used to represent your tastes as you described them with the indifference curves you plotted in A(a)?
(b) Repeat for the tastes as you described them with the indifference curves you plotted in A(b).