Undergraduate Program Status
Elective | 4th year | Economics |
Microeconomics studies how individual market participants, like households and firms, make their choices from the alternatives available to them. It also studies how such choices interact in the market to determine prices and resource allocations. A thorough understanding of microeconomics will be useful for any economic course students will take in the future and will provide an invaluable analytical framework for addressing a number of economically-relevant questions. Examples of such questions are the following: how do firms set wages for their employees? How do firms set prices for their products?
Successful completion of the course enables students to: 1. understand and formalize the optimizing behavior of market participants; 2. understand and formalize how interaction among market participants generates market outcomes in different settings; 3.understand and formalize the notions of partial and general equilibrium; 4. understand under what assumptions markets are efficient; 5. understand and formalize the inefficiencies arising from non-competitive market structures; 6. examine several causes of market failures and explore the options available to policy makers to increase efficiency; 7. understand and formalize strategic interaction between economic agents; 8. understand and formalize the behavior of market participants in the presence of uncertainty.