Principles of Microeconomics
How households, firms and markets allocate scarce resources: opportunity cost and marginal thinking, comparative advantage, trade and tariffs under USMCA, supply and demand, elasticity and tax incidence, consumer and producer surplus, price ceilings and floors with evidence on rent regulation and on federal and state minimum wages, sales and excise taxes, consumer choice and behavioral economics, production and costs, perfect competition, monopoly and price discrimination, oligopoly, game theory and the Sherman and Clayton Acts, and externalities, carbon pricing and cap-and-trade, public goods and labor markets with monopsony.
ECON-101 Year 1 3 credits 12 lessons · 5 h 41 min
Offered by HSM University · Business Foundations
This is the American version of this course. See the Canadian version.
What you'll learn
- Explain scarcity, opportunity cost, marginal analysis and incentives, distinguish positive from normative statements, and use the production possibilities frontier.
- Calculate opportunity costs and comparative advantage, show how specialization and trade create gains, and analyze who wins and loses from trade and tariffs.
- Use supply and demand to find equilibrium prices and quantities, distinguish shifts from movements, and predict the effects of market events.
- Calculate price, income, cross-price and supply elasticities, apply the total revenue test, and determine how elasticities divide the burden of a tax.
- Measure consumer, producer and total surplus, explain why competitive markets are efficient, and identify the main sources of market failure.
- Analyze price ceilings, price floors, taxes and tariffs, calculate deadweight losses, and evaluate evidence on rent regulation, minimum wages and sales and excise taxes in the United States.
- Apply utility maximization, budget constraints and indifference curves to consumer choice, separate income and substitution effects, and describe key findings of behavioral economics.
- Distinguish economic from accounting profit, construct short-run cost curves from a production function, and explain economies of scale and minimum efficient scale.
- Determine the profit-maximizing output and shutdown point of a competitive firm, and explain long-run equilibrium, entry, exit and efficiency.
- Find monopoly price and output, measure the deadweight loss of monopoly, explain natural monopoly regulation and analyze price discrimination.
- Analyze monopolistic competition and oligopoly using game theory and concentration measures, and explain US antitrust law under the Sherman, Clayton and FTC Acts and the 2023 Merger Guidelines.
- Evaluate policies for externalities, public goods and common resources, including carbon pricing, and explain how factor markets, marginal revenue product and monopsony determine wages.
Course content
12 lessons · 5 h 41 min total · final exam
- 1 Thinking like an economist 33 min · quiz
- 2 Trade-offs, specialization and gains from trade 27 min · quiz
- 3 Supply and demand 28 min · quiz
- 4 Elasticity 30 min · quiz
- 5 Efficiency, surplus and market failure 27 min · quiz
- 6 Markets and government: price controls and taxes 31 min · quiz
- 7 Consumer choice 28 min · quiz
- 8 Production and costs 27 min · quiz
- 9 Perfect competition 27 min · quiz
- 10 Monopoly and price discrimination 27 min · quiz
- 11 Oligopoly, monopolistic competition and competition policy 25 min · quiz
- 12 Externalities, public goods and factor markets 31 min · quiz
- E Final exam 20 questions
Description
How households, firms and markets allocate scarce resources: opportunity cost and marginal thinking, comparative advantage, trade and tariffs under USMCA, supply and demand, elasticity and tax incidence, consumer and producer surplus, price ceilings and floors with evidence on rent regulation and on federal and state minimum wages, sales and excise taxes, consumer choice and behavioral economics, production and costs, perfect competition, monopoly and price discrimination, oligopoly, game theory and the Sherman and Clayton Acts, and externalities, carbon pricing and cap-and-trade, public goods and labor markets with monopsony.
Part of the Business stream, typically taken in year 1.