10. Make a case for the thesis that "Small is Beautiful", not on the basis of internal diseconomies scale (or diminishing returns), but instead with reference to internal or external "Diseconomies of Scope".

Comments: Scope economies refer to savings or cost reductions associated with diversity or range of different inputs, technologies, outputs of an activity. Diseconomies might then refer to "overload", frictions between different components (skills, personalities, technologies, chemicals, organizational styles etc.) or, in an external context, excessive scope leading to perceived complexity leading to lack of public understanding; inappropriateness of infrastructure, public frictions resulting from excessive diversity... or, generally, as one of you pointed out, the disadvantages of having too many "jacks-of-all-trades" running around.

11. Need for conceptual frameworks: see extensive earlier e-mail message.

12. Consult what should be your quite extensive class notes. Make distinction between cargo (interest, urgency, reliability, JIT etc.) and passengers (lost work or leisure time) and the investments in transport facilities and equipment (interest on capital invested, rate of depreciation over time through actual use, even through idleness or through technological obsolescence) and finally other time related costs: salaries of pilots etc.


13. Networks: Most of you had very little trouble with designing networks and calculating their Beta values. Most of you recognized that Beta is a measure of connectivity, but many did not make a distinction between accessibility (as an attribute of a node and a measure of its locational/situational quality) and connectivity (as an attribute of a network and measure of its interconnectedness). The question than is how does one particular existing link (or an additional link) affect the accessibility of specific nodes (from or to other nodes) and, with the help of the BETA Index: how does the connectivity of the whole network change by taking out a link or add a new one? The salesman location problem obviously depended on the configuration of your specific network. In general you would have looked for the node which is best connected to itself via all other nodes. With this question, I tried to link Hagerstrand's time/space conceptual model to a more operational model (but you did not have to refer to Hagerstrand!)


Question 14: BRANCH CAMPUS

Many of you discussed the difficulty of assessing demand for the branch campus in terms of the demographic dynamics of commuter student and mentioned uncertainties regarding the size, distribution, and mobility of the commuter student population, including those presently enrolled in the UW as well as those who would now attend college because of its availability. They also mentioned the population growth of the suburbs which adds to the complexity of predicting future demand.

Less common were answers that dealt with the trade-offs between the size and and scope (economies and diseconomies) of the main campus, the accessibility (distance) for students and staff and possibly lower land costs for the branch. Factors such as the mixing of UW campus identities, prestige benefits, shared resources, and the potential for unnecessary duplication were mentioned by some students. Some students also discussed the problem of defining the optimal level of justifiable fixed or overhead costs when the branch campus is somewhat of an auxiliary campus rather than a discrete entity. Finally, a few students recognized that the location of the branch had to be such that it would best serve new student populations or unmet needs among the existing population without actually competing with the UW main campus for students or resources.
The difficulties of evaluating & comparing the "output", i.e. education quality and quantity in dollar terms sufficient to make rigorous location decisions based on (external) agglomeration- and internal scale- and scope economies and diseconomies could also have been mentioned among many other considerations. In general then, the "difficulty" is related at least to these factors: (a) measure of (intangible) output (different qualities of B.A.'s) (b) assessing the distance elasticity of demand for education in general, and branch campus education in particular. (incl. the question whether proximity to jobs or residence is more important for working students) (c) lack of understanding of the interdependencies on a campus between different departments (if you cannot have them all, which ones are most important for the whole (d) lack of understanding of how large and internally diverse individual departments ought to be (e) who all these questions relate to distance to the main campus and so on...

Question 15: LARGE CITY/SMALL CITY or LARGE MALL/SMALL MALL

You were more inclined to conclude that small cities and malls benefit from close proximity to their larger neighbors. While the explanations for this conclusion were generally well supported, few identified the costs of leakage to and market dominance by the larger city/mall. This question, in particular, was susceptible to empirical example answers with relatively little theoretical or conceptual thought. The question was formulated in a way which should have made it easy for you to relate it to the (at least in part) countervailing forces of attraction/positive spillovers/ agglomeration economies (suggesting advantages of proximity) and the competitive superiority of the large city crowding out the small city as a market center. Researchers have suggested that there tends to be a distance from the large city where a small city is worst off, namely there where the spillover-agglomeration economies are flattening out and where the benefits of carving out a market-hinterland more or less detached from that of the big city are not yet high enough to compensate.

Always ask yourself the question: How far can I go in answering the question by logic alone, deriving what you would expect to find before relying on your casual, incomplete and possibly biased own real-world observations or on (generally) expensive empirical surveys which may provide a lot facts and statistical associations but possibly very little explanation.

QUESTION 16: GOLF COURSES

Only few of you selected this question, and few seemed to get to the heart of the matter. It seemed rather obvious that the downtown course would need to charge higher rents based on accessibility to justify its equal consumption of space. Some simply evaded this answer by changing the facts and explaining that the suburban golf course was more justified in its location decision, or that it was appropriate for the center-city golf course to move to the suburban location. You could have used the obvious and palpable example of apartments of the same size with different rents depending on whether they are in downtown Seattle or Federal Way. Clearly, the same size of golf-course does not imply that the (land) use is equally "intensive" in that either the downtown course is used by more people or better taken care of in combination with use by higher-income people whose cost of time, cost of fancy equipment etc. is higher. While we could of course argue that downtown 18-hole courses would tend to use less land (and likely find this in reality), all you need to get theoretically larger downtown courses is to assume sufficient income differences and a strong preference of downtown executives for lunch-time golfing. Money can buy it all...