Principles of Microeconomics
Every graph a principles course runs: curves shifting, an indifference map tangent to a budget line, a payoff matrix resolving to Nash.
11 units · 105 topics · 478 questions
Why scarcity forces every choice into a trade-off, how a curve traces the limits of what an economy can produce, and why trading anyway makes both sides richer.
What Economics Studies: Scarcity and Choice · Opportunity Cost · Marginal Thinking: Costs and Benefits · Incentives and How People Respond to Them · +8 more
Two curves that never stop moving: what pushes each one, where they meet, and how sharply quantity reacts when price changes.
The Demand Curve and the Law of Demand · What Shifts the Demand Curve · The Supply Curve and the Law of Supply · What Shifts the Supply Curve · +10 more
The triangle of value a free market creates, and what happens to it when a price ceiling, a tax, or a subsidy pushes the market away from equilibrium.
Consumer Surplus · Producer Surplus and Total Surplus · Market Efficiency and the Invisible Hand · Price Ceilings and Shortages · +7 more
Where the demand curve actually comes from: a budget line, a map of preferences, and the point where they just touch.
The Budget Constraint · The Slope of the Budget Line and Relative Price · Shifts and Pivots of the Budget Line · Indifference Curves and Preferences · +8 more
How a factory's output translates into a family of cost curves, and why every curve eventually turns upward.
The Production Function and Total Product · Marginal and Average Product and Diminishing Returns · Fixed and Variable Costs in the Short Run · Marginal Cost and Average Cost Curves · +4 more
A market with so many identical sellers that none of them can move the price, and what that forces every firm to do.
What Makes a Market Perfectly Competitive · The Price-Taker's Flat Demand Curve · Profit Maximization Where Marginal Revenue Equals Marginal Cost · The Shutdown Decision in the Short Run · +3 more
A single seller with no competition to discipline it, the price it settles on instead, and the value that vanishes because of it.
How Market Power Arises: Barriers to Entry · Why a Monopolist's Marginal Revenue Falls Below Demand · Profit Maximization for a Monopolist · The Welfare Cost of Monopoly · +3 more
Markets between the two extremes, where firms compete on more than price and every decision has to guess what a rival will do next.
Monopolistic Competition and Product Differentiation · Excess Capacity and Markup Over Marginal Cost · The Kinked Demand Curve and Price Rigidity · Oligopoly and Strategic Interdependence · +5 more
Why a worker's wage traces back to what one more hour of their labor is worth, and how unequal the paychecks that follow can get.
Derived Demand for Labor · The Marginal Revenue Product of Labor · Hiring Where Marginal Revenue Product Equals the Wage · The Supply of Labor and the Work-Leisure Tradeoff · +7 more
What happens when a transaction spills costs or benefits onto people who never agreed to it, and why some goods can't be sold at all.
Negative Externalities and the Social Cost of Production · Positive Externalities and the Social Benefit of Consumption · The Coase Theorem and Private Bargaining · Pigouvian Taxes and Cap-and-Trade · +2 more
What a market does when one side knows something the other doesn't, and where real human choices depart from the rational ideal.
Asymmetric Information and Hidden Information · Adverse Selection and the Market for Lemons · Moral Hazard · Signaling · +4 more