The united states bureau of labor statistics publishes various indexes that measure average prices of consumer goods in urban areas. the sas data set aveprices contains data on the average price of unleaded regular gasoline (per gallon), whole large eggs (per dozen), and whole milk (per gallon) for a 10-year period by month in the united states. the variables in this file are year, month, price, and type of commodity. a. examine this sas data set including the variable labels and attributes. use one or more procedures to create a data set that contains the average price per year for each commodity. b. using one or more procedures, create a new version of this data set that has 12 variables corresponding to each month, that contain the

Suppose that two firms produce differentiated products and compete in prices. as in class, the two firms are located at two ends of a line one mile apart. consumers are evenly distributed along the line. the firms have identical marginal cost, $60. firm b produces a product with value $110 to consumers.firm a (located at 0 on the unit line) produces a higher quality product with value $120 to consumers. the cost of travel are directly related to the distance a consumer travels to purchase a good. if a consumerhas to travel a mile to purchase a good, the incur a cost of $20. if they have to travel x fraction of a mile, they incur a cost of $20x. (a) write down the expressions for how much a consumer at location d would value the products sold by firms a and b, if they set prices p_{a} and p_{b} ? (b) based on your expressions in (a), how much will be demanded from each firm if prices p_{a} and p_{b} are set? (c) what are the nash equilibrium prices?