This course is a part of:
Associate's Degree Program
Bachelor's Degree Program

This is an introductory course in Microeconomics for students who have no prior background in Economics. The approach used will be mostly non-quantitative, but graphical analysis will be emphasized. Students will learn the basic concepts on the demand and supply of goods, the economic behaviors of households and firms and their interactions, and market structures. Students will also study situations where a competitive market fails to function efficiently and the ways to deal with them. At the end of the course, students should have acquired basic analytical tools useful for a variety of economic problems in our daily lives. This course assumes that students have a working knowledge of High School Algebra.

Course Objectives

At the completion of this course, the student will have acquired knowledge and understanding of:

• The concept of opportunity cost, scarcity and choice, economic systems.
• Demand for goods, supply of goods, market equilibrium, the effects of changes in the demand and/or supply on equilibrium.
• The concept of elasticity – price elasticity of demand, cross elasticity of demand, income elasticity of demand, elasticity of supply.
• The concept of efficiency – marginal benefit vs. marginal cost, consumer surplus and producer surplus, market efficiency.
• The labor market and the minimum wage, taxes and subsidies.
• The household's consumption choices, the marginal utility theory, maximization of utility subject to a budget constraint.
• The firm and its economic problem – profit maximization, types of business organization, market structures in the U.S. economy.
• The firm's technology and its cost functions, short run vs. long run, economies of scale.
• Perfect competition – the firm’s decisions in perfect competition, equilibrium and efficiency under perfect competition.
• Monopoly – price setting strategies, equilibrium and efficiency under a monopoly, price discrimination.
• Monopolistic competition – characteristics of this market structure and examples.
• Oligopoly – characteristics of this market structure and examples.
• Government regulation of the market, the economic theory of regulation, the antitrust laws.
• Externalities – examples of positive and negative externalities, ways to deal with them.
• Public goods and the free-rider problem, common resources and the public choice.