Intro microeconomics
Undergraduate · Economics
Syllabus focus
Topics typically covered
Standard syllabus
Foundations and demand
- Scarcity, opportunity cost, and PPF
- Comparative advantage and gains from trade
- Supply, demand, and elasticity
- Consumer choice: budget constraints and preferences (as taught)
- Surplus measures and efficiency
- Price controls and tax incidence
Firms and markets
- Production, costs, and profit maximization
- Perfect competition short-run and long-run
- Monopoly and price discrimination (intro)
- Monopolistic competition and oligopoly survey
- Factor markets overview (intro)
- Strategy and payoff matrices (intro game theory)
Market failure and policy
- Externalities and corrective taxes/subsidies
- Public goods and common resources
- Asymmetric information (adverse selection/moral hazard intro)
- Antitrust and regulation survey
- Behavioral economics hooks (optional)
- Welfare analysis with graphs
STEM / applied
Quantitative practice
- Graphing shifts and calculating elasticities
- Cost-curve sketching from tables
- Numerical profit-max examples
- Spreadsheet exercises for demand/cost data
- Interpreting real price/quantity news with models
- Exam strategies for graph-heavy tests
Applications
- Policy memos using surplus/DWL language
- Industry case studies (tech, energy, healthcare survey)
- Connecting micro to business decisions
- Ethics of market power and pricing
- Data vignettes from FRED or course datasets
- Capstone problem set spanning units
Notes
Business-school versions may use less calculus; econ-major tracks may preview derivatives. Tutoring matches the course’s math level.