Universitat Internacional de Catalunya - BarcelonaMicroeconomics 2
Main language of instruction: Catalan
Other languages of instruction: English
If the student is enrolled for the English track then classes for that subject will be taught in the same language.
Head instructor
Dr. Manuel Fernando FLORES - mflores@uic.es
Office hours
Mondays 9:00-10:00 or Fridays 17:00-18:00. Important: please send an email in advance in order to confirm your meeting with the instructor (mflores@uic.es).
Microeconomics is the study of individuals, households and firms' behavior in decision making and allocation of scarce resources. It studies how individuals/households make consumption choices, what factors influence their choices and how their decisions affect the markets of goods in terms of the prices set by firms, the supply and demand.
Understanding Microeconomic analysis is essential as it provides us with the necessary economic tools to understand and make certain business decisions, governmental economic policies that affect firms’ management and, in general, to understand the functioning of a modern economy.
The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the analysis of business decisions and evaluating the performance of different markets and the economy as a whole.
To learn the basic microeconomic tools to study various models of economic theory. The focus of the course is designed so that students learn to think like economists in explaining events and different economic and business decisions.
After this course you will be able to:
Lesson 0: Introduction
Lesson 0.1. Preliminaries.
Lesson 0.2. The bascics of supply and demand.
Lesson 1: Review of Economic theory of the consumer
Lesson 1.1. Consumer budget, preferences, utility, and choice.
Lesson 1.2. Demand.
Lesson 2: Review of Economic theory of the firm.
Lesson 2.1. Cost minimization and Cost curves.
Lesson 2.2. Firm supply and perfect competition.
Lesson 2.3. Industry Supply.
Lesson 3: Monopoly
Lesson 3.1. Definition and characteristics.
Lesson 3.2. Profit maximization of the monopoly.
Lesson 3.3. Inefficiency of the monopoly.
Lesson 3.4. Natural monopoly.
Lesson 3.5. Price discrimination: definition and strategies.
Lesson 4: Monopolistic competition
Lesson 4.1. Characteristics and imperfect competition.
Lesson 4.2. Product differentiation.
Lesson 5: Oligopoly
Lesson 5.1. Characteristics of Oligopolies: how to choose a strategy?
Lesson 5.2. Non-cooperative oligopolies: Cournot, Stackelberg, and Bertrand models.
Lesson 5.3 Cooperative oligopolies: Collusion.
Lesson 6: Game theory
Lesson 6.1. Two-player game: Nash Equilibrium.
Lesson 6.2. Simultaneous and Sequential games.
Lesson 6.3. Strategies.
Lesson 7: Asymmetric information
PINDYCK, R. & RUBINFELD, D. (2009). Microeconomics. Ed. Prentice-Hall
VARIAN, H. (2009). Intermediate Microeconomics: A Modern Approach. W. W. Norton & Company
FRANK, R. (2008), Microeconomics and behavior. McGraw-Hill Irwin
SNYDER, C. & NICHOLSON, W. (2012). Microeconomic theory, Cengage Learning