Microeconomics

The course aims to introduce students to the basics of microeconomics. In its first part the course will present the functioning of the market as the interaction of demand and supply stemming from the optimization choices of rational consumers and producers. The second part of the course will introduce the characterizing features of major market typologies: perfect competition, monopoly, and different form of oligopoly. The basics of market failures will be also discussed.

At the end of the course students will be endowed with the basic theoretical and applied/quantitative toolkit for the economic analysis of producer, consumer and policy decision maker's choices, the market functioning and its regulation. Furthermore, students will be able to autonomously apply this knowledge to the economic interpretation of many facts characterizing everyday experience such as: price and quantity strategies by firms, taxation, congestion of public transportation. Finally, students will develop the capacity to examine critically economic policy decisions through a more in depth classroom discussion on selected topics such as: efficiency vs equity, market failures, the limits of public intervention.