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This article details how the large company Proctor & Gamble is attempting to cut variable costs by eliminating jobs, which leads to lower labour costs. This action results in a lower cost for their products, leading to more productive efficiency. This competitive behaviour is also partially reflective of perfect competition, where companies must decrease costs in order to increase profits; however the article also focuses a lot on the advertising done by Proctor & Gamble, which is not fitting with the assumptions of the perfect competition model.

"Poet, which currently produces 1.5 billion gallons a year of ethanol from corn, said its 1-year-old pilot plant has reduced the cost of making ethanol from corncobs to $2.35 a gallon from $4.13 by cutting capital costs and using an improved "cocktail" of enzymes" - (picked from the article) The company also changed their source of fuel in order to produce a bigger amount of ethanol.

This video talks about how after the economic crisis a company located in England called BAE, the world's second largest military defense company who employs more than 40,000 people, talks about opportunity cost because of the resent cut backs in their contract. It talks about how England is trying to become more reliant on industry instead of finance. Lastly, it talks about the companies cuts from the government and job security because local governments have cut their spending with BAE, they are spending their money to invest into their own economy. Finally, I think it relates to scarcity because money itself is scare and government have to decide how to spend it efficiently.

Schooling and education is a public good as it does not recieve a profit however, this article shows that at the moment it may be costing the government too much and they have decided that they have to cut back on what they are spending on it. No other companies would provide it as they will not get a profit out of it.

This article is about cuts for schools. There will be less money for public schools. Since schooling is a public good, this article applies to this weeks work.

This article talks about the effect production costs have had on the number of episodes in a season. In an attempt to be productively efficient as production costs per episodes rise, show producers have simply had to cut down the output of episodes. This makes sense because if we shift the AC curve left, the cost will decrease, but so will the output when AC=MC (productive efficiency).

Most of you all already know about RIM's decision to cut the selling price of their tablet, the Playbook, by more than half (presumably because they are discontinuing the product). This is an example of a large firm cutting costs and reducing its output (from their inventories). We can also relate it to the concept of economies of scale, since Blackberry was able to afford to lose the Playbook as their other products are more successful.

The United States hit Chinese solar companies with punitive import tariffs of 30 percent or more, ruling they had dumped cut-price solar panels into the U.S. market. Several of the Chinese companies and a solar trade group opposed to the tariffs denounced the duties, and said they would drive up costs for the clean energy source, stunting its fast growth.