Introductory Microeconomics

Analyze forms of market structure, from organized and unorganized markets to perfect competition, monopoly, and monopolistic competition, highlighting price takers and price makers.

Explain the law of demand and its determinants, including price-quantity tradeoffs, shifts in market demand from income, tastes, expectations, and substitutes and complements.

Explore the law of supply and its determinants, including shifts and movements along supply, as price, input costs, technology, and expectations drive market equilibrium, surplus, and shortage.

Explore how price and income changes shape the elasticity of demand and supply, detailing the five elasticity types and their effects on total revenue and substitutes.

Explore how price ceilings and price floors bind prices, create shortages or surpluses, and drive rationing, illustrating why market equilibrium differs from government-imposed outcomes.

Explain how tax incidence redistributes the burden between buyers and sellers. Show how a tax creates a price wedge and lowers market quantity, with both sides sharing the burden.

Explore the budget constraint concept by analyzing how income and prices of two commodities, pizza and Pepsi, shape attainable choices and the opportunity cost via the slope.

Represent consumer preferences using the ordinal approach and indifference curves to determine equilibrium on the budget constraint. Explain how marginal rate of substitution and relative prices guide optimal two-good consumption.

Explain how income changes shift the budget constraint and how price changes decompose into income and substitution effects, illustrating with indifference curves and normal and inferior goods.

Explore how the demand curve derives from consumer optimization, budget constraints, and indifference analysis, including the downward and upward sloping cases like the Giffen goods scenario.

Explore how wages influence labor supply by analyzing the leisure–consumption trade-off, showing substitution and income effects that can bend the labor supply curve backward when higher wages tempt more leisure.

Explore how costs arise from the production function, including explicit and implicit costs, fixed and variable costs, and how total and marginal costs shape profit, revenue, and output decisions.

Explore how short-run and long-run average total costs relate as firms adjust labor and capital, illustrating economies and diseconomies of scale with Ford's factory choices.

Explain how a perfectly competitive market features many buyers and sellers, homogeneous products, and price takers, and how profit maximization occurs when marginal revenue equals marginal cost.

Examine monopoly power and profit maximization under private market structure. Identify barriers to entry and natural monopolies driven by economies of scale and downward-sloping demand.

Explore how input markets allocate labor, land, and capital through production functions and marginal product of labor. Learn how the value of marginal product sets the wage at equilibrium.