Principles of Microeconomics

Explore how opportunity cost drives trade, and how absolute and comparative advantages enable countries to specialize, set favorable terms of trade, and expand production possibility frontier for gains from trade.

Explore how market demand and supply determine price and equilibrium, and how demand shifts with income, substitutes and complements, tastes, expectations, and number of buyers.

Demonstrates how the market supply curve rises. Shows how shifts and movements along demand and supply determine equilibrium price and quantity, with surplus or shortage driving prices toward equilibrium.

Learn elasticity and its applications, including determinants of price elasticity of demand, how price changes affect demand and revenue, and the midpoint method for calculation.

Explore how total revenue depends on price and quantity, and how elasticity (inelastic, elastic, and unit elastic) drives pricing decisions, including income elasticity of demand and cross-price elasticity of demand.

Explore how price ceilings and price floors, taxes, tax incidence, and elasticities shape supply and demand under government policies, with examples of shortages, surpluses, and tax burdens.

Explore welfare economics by examining consumer surplus and producer surplus, and how their interaction affects economic well-being, along with the impacts of taxes, trade, and perfectly competitive equilibrium.

Analyze how tax wedges reduce welfare by shifting prices, creating dead weight loss, redistributing consumer and producer surplus and tax revenue, and examining elasticity and trade effects.

Externalities create market inefficiencies and motivate policy responses. The lecture compares command-and-control regulation with market-based taxes and subsidies, plus private solutions and the Coase theorem, highlighting transaction costs.

Explore how excludability and rivaling consumption distinguish private, public, club, and common resources, and examine the free rider problem and the tragedy of the commons.

Explore the cost of production, comparing explicit and implicit costs, and economic versus accounting profit, while examining marginal cost and the average total cost curves with fixed and variable costs.

Explore perfect competition, where many price-taker firms offer identical products with free entry and exit, leading to zero long-run economic profit and decisions based on marginal revenue and marginal cost.

Define monopoly and barriers to entry, including resources and patents, compare pricing with perfect competition, and explain short- and long-run profits and welfare effects of price discrimination.

Monopolistic competition blends features of perfect competition and monopoly: many firms with differentiated products, brand loyalty, downward-sloping demand, market power, and zero profits in the long run.

Explore oligopolies through game theory, examining collusion, cartels, Nash equilibrium, and the prisoner's dilemma to understand pricing, output, and implications for economic well-being.