Microeconomics for Management

Catalog description

Microeconomics is the science making decisions. Economists use models to study how individuals, businesses, and governments deal with choice. The goal of this class is to build familiarity with modern microeconomic theory and its applications to the real world. Modern economics has become very math-intensive. While this course will not be math-heavy, we will be using some math in this course: largely two-dimensional graphs and algebra, with some discussion of calculus in terms of slopes, tangents, and rates of change. The class begins with the most basic models of how markets work using consumer and producer behavior. These models assume consumers and producers have full information, accept a price as given, and respond accordingly. We will then expand these models to allow for more realistic scenarios: market power (consumers or producers can manipulate prices), imperfect or asymmetric information (consumers or producers have varied knowledge), and externalities (consumer or producer decisions impact others). In each case, we consider the implications of the models within the context of business management.