User talk:Csis-agt

Thanks for "Price elasticity of demand" article edits
Thanks for clarifying those elasticity definitions in the PED article. The article is inconsistent about using the negative sign—as are most of the textbooks—so I'd been wanting to clean that section up for awhile, but have been preoccupied with other projects (limited resources vs. unlimited wants and all that). One of those projects is planning a rather substantial revision of the article in pursuit of FA status. Several members of the Econ Project have been discussing this, and we'd certainly welcome your help. (Most of the revision would involve some reorganization of what's there, but there'll be some additional material, too.) We'll put something about the proposed changes on the article's talk page eventually (before actually making any major revisions) to give anyone interested the opportunity to comment and contribute.

I noticed that you removed the absolute value signs, which weren't consistent with the notation in the table. I've been surveying over a dozen different introductory and intermediate texts to see how they treat a number of different points, including this one, so we can follow the consensus practice, assuming there is one. So far, I haven't found any texts that keep the negative sign consistently throughout their discussion. Most of them just say up front that PED is always negative (with minor exceptions), so we adopt the convention of treating it as positive because it's easier to talk about that way. The rest eventually explicitly switch from the negative sign to absolute value. All these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, of course.

One of the things I'd like to do in any revision is to be completely consistent in treating the negative sign, because switching back and forth is bound to confuse many of those who read the article, who're likely new to the topic anyway. I'm leaning strongly toward what seems to be the majority approach, which basically how the intro to the PED is currently written: i.e., (as mentioned above) PED is usually negative, so we usually drop the negative sign by convention. Overall, I think this approach makes the rest of the article easier for the typical reader to understand. Personally, even after teaching this topic for years, I still find it a lot easier to think about the elasticity of a demand curve increasing as the coefficient increases (in absolute value). I find it less intuitive, and inevitably get something backwards eventually, when I have to think about a smaller negative value meaning demand is more elastic!

I'd welcome your thoughts on the subject. Thanks again for your edits. --Jackftwist (talk) 17:25, 4 June 2010 (UTC)