We have prepared this course to highlight the simplicity of economic ideas and their extraordinary power to explain, predict and improve what is going on in the world. We want students to master the basic principles of economic analysis. With this goal in mind, we identify three key ideas that lie at the heart of the economic approach to understanding human behavior: optimization, equilibrium, and empiricism. These abstract words represent three ideas that are actually quite intuitive.
Course content is as follows in week order: Introduction, Technology, Profit Maximization and Profit Function, Cost Minimization and Cost Function, Utility Maximization and Choice, Consumer Theory, Uncertainty and Econometrics, Partial Equilibrium: Perfect Competition and Imperfect Competition, General Equilibrium: Production, Competitive Market , Walrasian Equilibrium, Production, Time and Asset Markets, Social Choice, Welfare, Public Goods and Externalities, Game Theory, Information Economics, Auctions and Mechanism Design.