Mathematical economics - Quiz
  • 1. Mathematical economics is a branch of economics that utilizes mathematical methods to represent economic theories and analyze economic problems. It combines economic theory with mathematical tools to develop models that can help explain and predict economic behavior. By using mathematical equations and models, economists can quantify relationships between various economic variables and study the impact of different policies and factors on economic outcomes. Mathematical economics has applications in various fields, such as finance, game theory, decision theory, and microeconomics. It allows economists to formulate precise hypotheses, conduct rigorous analysis, and make informed policy recommendations based on data and evidence.

    In economics, what does the term 'equilibrium' refer to?
A) A state of chaos in the market
B) A state of constant change
C) A state of maximum production
D) A state where supply equals demand
  • 2. What does the concept of 'marginal utility' measure?
A) Total satisfaction gained from consuming a good
B) Additional satisfaction gained from consuming one more unit of a good
C) Total quantity of a good consumed
D) Price of the last unit of a good purchased
  • 3. Which economic theory focuses on the relationship between production capacity and inflation?
A) Chicago school of economics
B) Phillips curve
C) Keynesian economics
D) Austrian economics
  • 4. What is the purpose of game theory in economics?
A) To design economic policies
B) To analyze strategic interactions between rational decision-makers
C) To predict market trends
D) To study historical economic data
  • 5. What is the purpose of linear programming in economic analysis?
A) To optimize resource allocation given constraints
B) To forecast future demand
C) To analyze historical trends
D) To graph economic data
  • 6. What is 'opportunity cost' in economics?
A) Cost of resources used in production
B) Total cost of production
C) Price of a good in a competitive market
D) The value of the best alternative forgone in order to make a particular choice
  • 7. Which economic concept is used to measure the responsiveness of quantity demanded to a price change?
A) Income effect
B) Cross-price elasticity
C) Market equilibrium
D) Elasticity of demand
  • 8. What does 'Pareto efficiency' refer to in welfare economics?
A) Equal distribution of wealth
B) Allocation of resources where no individual can be made better off without making another worse off
C) Elimination of poverty
D) Maximum total utility for all individuals
  • 9. In utility theory, what does the 'indifference curve' represent?
A) Curve representing diminishing marginal utility
B) All combinations of goods that provide the same level of utility to a consumer
C) Curve showing only one optimal choice
D) Curve indicating increasing marginal utility
  • 10. Who is credited with coining the term 'statistics'?
A) Sir William Petty
B) John Maynard Keynes
C) Johann Heinrich von Thünen
D) Gottfried Achenwall
  • 11. What was the term used by a group of professors in England for reasoning with figures related to government?
A) Economic Calculus
B) Mathematical Economics
C) Statistical Analysis
D) Political Arithmetick
  • 12. Which economist's work is considered the first example of marginal analysis?
A) W.S. Jevons
B) Sir William Petty
C) Johann Heinrich von Thünen
D) John Maynard Keynes
  • 13. Who presented a paper on the 'general mathematical theory of political economy' in 1862?
A) Robert Heilbroner
B) Friedrich Hayek
C) Gottfried Achenwall
D) W.S. Jevons
  • 14. What did W.S. Jevons declare political economy must be, due to its dealing with quantities?
A) Qualitative
B) Theoretical
C) Empirical
D) Mathematical
  • 15. Who criticized the broad use of mathematical models for human behavior?
A) Johann Heinrich von Thünen, W.S. Jevons
B) Gottfried Achenwall, Sir William Petty
C) None of the above
D) John Maynard Keynes, Robert Heilbroner, Friedrich Hayek
  • 16. What was the main method used in economic analysis before the 19th century?
A) Matrix algebra
B) Algebraic means
C) Differential calculus
D) Game theory
  • 17. Which economist's work was largely ignored by English scholars despite its influence?
A) Sir William Petty
B) Johann Heinrich von Thünen
C) Gottfried Achenwall
D) W.S. Jevons
  • 18. Who are considered the precursors to modern mathematical economics?
A) John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and Paul Samuelson
B) Augustin Cournot, Léon Walras, and Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
C) Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter
D) Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill
  • 19. How is the market price determined in Cournot's duopoly model?
A) By government regulation
B) By the total quantity supplied by both sellers
C) By the individual demand curve of each seller
D) By the cost of production for each seller
  • 20. What type of equilibrium can Cournot's solution be considered as in modern terms?
A) Pareto efficiency
B) Nash equilibrium
C) Walrasian equilibrium
D) Kaldor-Hicks efficiency
  • 21. What was the initial reception of Cournot's contributions to economics?
A) Implemented in policy immediately
B) Neglected for decades
C) Immediately accepted and celebrated
D) Rejected entirely without consideration
  • 22. How many separate models of exchange did Walras originally present?
A) Four
B) Two
C) Five
D) Three
  • 23. What does Walras' law state about markets reaching equilibrium?
A) Only one market needs to clear for all others to follow
B) All markets must clear simultaneously
C) If n-1 markets cleared, the nth market would clear as well
D) Markets cannot reach equilibrium independently
  • 24. How many markets does Walras use to illustrate his law most easily?
A) Three
B) Four
C) Two
D) Five
  • 25. In which field is Lagrangian duality and convex analysis used daily?
A) Operations research
B) Economics
C) Pure mathematics
D) Physics
  • 26. Which journal was founded in 1933 to promote econometrics?
A) Journal of Political Economy
B) Econometrica
C) Quarterly Journal of Economics
D) The American Economic Review
  • 27. Which theory became more extensively used in economics after Richard Bellman's work on dynamic programming?
A) Optimal control theory
B) Variational calculus
C) Functional analysis
D) Fixed-point theory
  • 28. What does ACE stand for in economic modeling?
A) Automated computational engineering
B) Advanced computational econometrics
C) Applied calculus of economics
D) Agent-based computational economics
  • 29. What institution helped promote the linking of statistical analysis to economic theory in the 1930s and 1940s?
A) The Cowles Commission
B) National Bureau of Economic Research
C) American Economic Association
D) Econometric Society
  • 30. Who worked with John von Neumann on the theory of games?
A) Reinhard Selten
B) John Nash
C) John Harsanyi
D) Oskar Morgenstern
  • 31. When did the field of agent-based computational economics begin to emerge?
A) Mid-2000s
B) About the 1990s
C) Late 1970s
D) Early 1980s
  • 32. How did Kantorovich refer to prices in his models?
A) "Economic variables"
B) "Market equilibria"
C) "Optimal functions"
D) "Objectively determined valuations"
  • 33. Who argued that economic problems which can be quantified should be treated by means of mathematical work?
A) Alfred Marshall
B) Adam Smith
C) John Maynard Keynes
D) Milton Friedman
  • 34. What term is used to describe sets of allocations where no exchanges can make at least one individual better off without making any other worse off?
A) Invisible hand hypothesis
B) Comparative statics
C) Walrasian equilibrium
D) Pareto efficient
  • 35. Who later confirmed Edgeworth's findings about the effect of taxes on prices?
A) Harold Hotelling
B) Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman
C) Arthur Lyon Bowley
D) Jeremy Bentham
  • 36. Who developed the model of input-output analysis in 1936?
A) Paul Samuelson
B) Wassily Leontief
C) Leonid Kantorovich
D) Von Neumann
  • 37. During what event was linear programming used to plan the shipment of supplies to Berlin?
A) Berlin airlift (1948)
B) Cold War
C) World War I
D) Cuban Missile Crisis
  • 38. What type of technologies produce outputs using constant proportions of inputs?
A) von Neumann technologies
B) Arrow–Debreu models
C) Linear programming techniques
D) Leontief technologies
  • 39. What mathematical concept did Paul Samuelson compare to tâtonnement?
A) Brouwer's fixed point theorem
B) Pareto efficiency
C) Von Neumann's equilibrium model
D) Le Chatelier's principle
  • 40. Who first applied differential calculus to analyze microeconomics by treating decisions as attempts to change allocations of goods?
A) John von Neumann
B) Alfred Marshall
C) Paul Samuelson
D) Vilfredo Pareto
  • 41. Who graphically developed the two-person solution to Edgeworth's problem in 1924?
A) Harold Hotelling
B) Jeremy Bentham
C) Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman
D) Arthur Lyon Bowley
  • 42. In what year did John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern make significant contributions to game theory?
A) 1994
B) 1965
C) 1951
D) 1944
  • 43. Who is credited with the formal derivation and exposition of the cobweb model?
A) Trygve Haavelmo
B) Ragnar Frisch
C) Henry L. Moore
D) Nicholas Kaldor
  • 44. Which economic theory posits that consumers maximize their utility subject to budget constraints?
A) Macroeconomics
B) Input-output economics
C) General equilibrium theory
D) Microeconomics
  • 45. In which year did Francis Ysidro Edgeworth publish 'Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences'?
A) 1881
B) 1905
C) 1924
D) 1878
  • 46. What did John von Neumann introduce to economic theory in his 1937 model?
A) Functional analytic methods including topology
B) Optimal control theory
C) Dynamic programming
D) Convex sets and fixed-point theory
  • 47. In which year did Nash, Harsanyi, and Selten receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences?
A) 2010
B) 2001
C) 1994
D) 1985
  • 48. Which concept did von Neumann's model use only nonnegative matrices?
A) Graph theory
B) Convex sets
C) Linear programming
D) Differential calculus
  • 49. What was the nature of Moore's first models of production?
A) Static
B) Probabilistic
C) Dynamic
D) Empirical
  • 50. Who published 'The Probability Approach in Econometrics' in 1944?
A) Trygve Haavelmo
B) Ragnar Frisch
C) Nicholas Kaldor
D) Henry L. Moore
  • 51. What is the primary objective in a nonlinear optimization problem?
A) Solve h_j(x)
B) Equalize g_i(x)
C) Minimize f(x)
D) Maximize f(x)
  • 52. In what year did Henry L. Moore publish his dynamic 'moving equilibrium' model?
A) 1892
B) 1925
C) 1933
D) 1944
  • 53. What has become increasingly important to professionals in economics and finance due to the sophistication of mathematical methods?
A) Mathematics
B) Econometrics
C) Statistics
D) Programming
  • 54. What type of problems often require the use of mathematical tools due to their complexity?
A) Qualitative research studies
B) Simple arithmetic calculations
C) Basic economic theory
D) Economic problems with many variables
  • 55. What concept did Edgeworth adopt from Jeremy Bentham in his economic model?
A) Opportunity cost
B) Utilitarianism
C) Felicific calculus
D) Marginal utility
  • 56. What percentage of articles in top economic journals in 2003 and 2004 lacked both statistical analysis and mathematical expressions?
A) 15%
B) 5.8%
C) 10%
D) 20%
  • 57. What paradigm does ACE fall under?
A) Behavioral finance
B) Complex adaptive systems
C) Quantum economics
D) Classical mechanics
  • 58. Which school of thought criticized the mathematization of economics?
A) Neoclassical schools
B) The Chicago school
C) Keynesian school
D) The Austrian school
  • 59. What did Milton Friedman say about economic model assumptions?
A) 'All assumptions are unrealistic.'
B) Assumptions are irrelevant to model performance.
C) Assumptions should always match reality.
D) Models should not be judged by their predictive performance.
  • 60. Who coined the term 'econometrics'?
A) Henry L. Moore
B) Ragnar Frisch
C) Trygve Haavelmo
D) Nicholas Kaldor
  • 61. What type of functions benefit most from convex duality?
A) Linear functions
B) Polyhedral convex functions
C) Non-convex functions
D) Quadratic functions
  • 62. In which decade was linear programming developed to aid resource allocation in Russia?
A) 1950s
B) 1960s
C) 1930s
D) 1940s
Created with That Quiz — where test making and test taking are made easy for math and other subject areas.