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 Learning Outcomes

At the completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Define opportunity cost, scarcity, choice and various economic systems.
• Demonstrate Supply and Demand curves, identify/calculate market equilibrium and demonstrate the effects of changes in demand and supply on market equilibrium.
• Delineate the concept of elasticity, including price elasticity of demand, cross-elasticity of demand, income elasticity of demand, and elasticity of supply.
• Express efficiency as a trade-off between marginal benefit and marginal cost.
• Identify consumer surplus and producer surplus on a graph and explain efficiency of the market.
• Outline the inputs to the labor market, including minimum wage, taxes and subsidies.
• Discuss and show the interplay between consumption choices, marginal utility theory, and the maximization of utility subject to a budget constraint.
• Explain the firm and its economic problem – profit maximization, identify types of business organization, and identify market structures in the U.S. economy.
• Relate the firm’s technology and cost functions, short run vs. long run, economies of scale.
• Characterize perfect competition – as well as the firm’s decisions in perfect competition, equilibrium and efficiency under perfect competition.
• Label a monopoly – price setting strategies, equilibrium and efficiency under a monopoly, price discrimination.
• Distinguish monopolistic competition from monopoly– including delineation of the characteristics of this market structure and examples.
• Ascertain a market as an oligopoly – including identification of characteristics of this market structure and examples.
• Discuss and demonstrate the effect of government regulation of the market, the economic theory of regulation, and the antitrust laws.
• Categorize externalities and their effect on markets and prices– give examples of positive and negative externalities, and offer ways to deal with them.
• Classify public goods and explain the free-rider problem, common resources and the public choice.