Course Syllabus

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Course Description:

[INSTRUCTORS: We have included the C-ID descriptor here as a place holder. As with all sections, feel free to keep this information, replace it with your local course description, or remove this section entirely.]

 This is an introductory course focusing on choices of individual economic decision-makers. Topics include scarcity, specialization and trade, market equilibrium, elasticity, production and cost theory, market structures, factor markets, and market failure.

Student Learning Outcomes:

[INSTRUCTORS: We have included the C-ID outcomes here as a place holder. As with all sections, feel free to keep this information, replace it with your local Student Learning Outcomes, or remove it entirely.]

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

  1. Utilize the concept of scarcity to explain economic trade-offs, opportunity costs, and rational behavior.
  2. Calculate and interpret measures of elasticity. 
  3. Demonstrate how markets function and what happens in the presence of market failures. 
  4. Analyze production and costs of the firm.
  5. Demonstrate how firms attempt to optimize their objectives in response to price signals under a variety of market structures in the short and long-run.

Course Content:

[INSTRUCTORS: Insert course content]:

  1. Fundamentals of Economic Thinking
    1. Scarcity
    2. Opportunity Costs
    3. Production Possibilities
    4. Marginal Analysis
    5. Rational Behavior
    6. Positive v. Normative Distinction
  2. How Markets Operate
    1. Definition of a market
    2. Factors of production
    3. Supply and demand
    4. Price mechanism
    5. Producer and consumer surplus
    6. Price controls
  3. Elasticity
  4. Consumer demand
  5. Production and cost in the firm
    1. Introduction to the production function
    2. Marginal and average product
    3. Law of diminishing returns
    4. Explicit and implicit cost
    5. Accounting profit v. economic profit
    6. Total cost, average cost and marginal cost in short-run
    7. Short-run production decisions
    8. Long run average cost curve
    9. Economies and diseconomies of scale
  6. Market structures
    1. Perfect competition
    2. Monopoly
    3. Monopolistic competition
    4. Oligopoly
  7. Introduction to factor markets
  8. Market failure and public policy
  9. Specialization and gains from trade

Textbook:

Great news: your textbook for this class is available for free online!
Principles of Microeconomics from OpenStax, ISBN 1-947172-29-8

You have several options to obtain this book:

    You can use whichever formats you want. Web view is recommended -- the responsive design works seamlessly on any device.

    Important Notes:

    • All first week assignments need to be completed and submitted by the due date to avoid possibly being dropped from the class.
    • Any student needing accommodations should inform the instructor. Students with disabilities who may need accommodations for this class are encouraged to notify the instructor and contact the Disability Resource Center (DRC) [link to your college's DSPS website] early in the quarter so that reasonable accommodations may be implemented as soon as possible. Students may contact the DRC by visiting the Center (located in room A205) or by phone (541-4660 ext. 249 voice or 542-1870 TTY for deaf students). All information will remain confidential.
    • Academic dishonesty and plagiarism will result in a failing grade on the assignment. Using someone else's ideas or phrasing and representing those ideas or phrasing as our own, either on purpose or through carelessness, is a serious offense known as plagiarism. "Ideas or phrasing" includes written or spoken material, from whole papers and paragraphs to sentences, and, indeed, phrases but it also includes statistics, lab results, art work, etc.  Please see the YourCollegeName handbook for policies regarding plagiarism, harassment, etc. [link to your college's academic honesty policies]

    Course Summary:

    Date Details Due