363-0515-00L  Decisions and Markets

SemesterSpring Semester 2015
LecturersA. Bommier
Periodicityyearly recurring course
Language of instructionEnglish


AbstractThis course provides an introduction to microeconomics. The course is open to students who have completed an undergraduate course in economics principles and an undergraduate course in multivariate calculus. The course emphasizes the conceptual foundations of microeconomics and concrete examples of their application.
ObjectiveMicroeconomics is a element of nearly every subfield in economic analysis today. Model building in economics relies on a number of fundamental frameworks, many of which are introduced for the first time in intermediate microeconomics, a course which is customarily offered for third-year undergraduate majors in economics.

The purpose of this course is to provide MTEC master students with an introduction to graduate-level microeconomics, particularly for students considering further graduate work in economics, business administration or management science. The course provides the fundamental concepts and tools for graduate courses in economics offered at ETH and UZH.
ContentThe lectures will cover consumer choice, producer theory, markets and market failure. The course will include a concrete examples of the use of the theory of choice in applied economics.
Lecture notesThe course will be mostly based on the textbook by R. Serrano and A. Feldman: "A short Course in Intermediate Economics with Calculus" (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Another textbook of interest is the one by H. Varian "Intermediate Microeconomics: A Modern Approach" (Norton, 2009)
LiteratureExercises are available in the textbook of R. Serrano and A. Feldman on which the lecture is based ("A short Course in Intermediate Economics with Calculus", Cambridge University Press, 2013).
More exercises can be found in the book by T. Bergstrom and H. Varian, "Workouts in Intermediate Microeconomics" (Norton, 2010)