Warm-ups

• Review of Mathematics:

  • Differential & Integral calculus

  • Constrained Optimization

  • Probability Theory

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Consumer Theory

Part 1: Consumer choice & Demand

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• Chapter 1: Overview of Microeconomics

  • Topics to be covered

• Chapter 2: Budget Constraint

  • Modeling income and prices

• Chapter 3 & 4: Preferences and Utility

  • Constructing Utility functions from preferences: Substitutes, Complements

• Chapter 5-8: Choice and Comparative statics

  • Budget Constrained Utility optimization

  • Slutsky Equation: Income vs Substitution Effects

  • Own price, Cross price, and Income Elasticity of Demand

• Chapter 12: Uncertainty:

  • Risk Aversion & expected Utility

• Chapter 14-16: Demand & welfare:

  • Consumer Surplus

  • Demand & Supply

• Extra Topics: Big Data: Visualizing real life demand from data

• Extra Topics: Behavioral Economics

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Cost, Supply, and Market structures

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​Part 2: The firm’s problem

• Chapter 18: Technology

  • Different production functions

  • Technical rate of Substitution, returns to scale

• Chapter 19-20: Profit Maximization & Cost Minimization, Duality

• Chapter 21-23: Cost & Supply, Perfectly competitive market

• Chapter 26: Factor demand

  • Extra topic: Labor Economics

• Monopsony, Oligopsony

  • Extra topic: Urban economics:

  • Firm’s location choice, capital & labor intensity

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​Part 3: Market structures

• Chapter 24 & 25: Monopoly & Monopolistic Competition

  • 3 Degrees of price discrimination

  • Differentiated products

• Chapter 27 -29: Oligopoly & Game Theory

  • Prisoner’s Dilemma

  • Nash Equilibrium

  • Price vs quantity competition: Cournot vs Bertrand

  • Simultaneous game vs Sequential game: Stackelberg

  • Collusion

• Extra topics: More Games:

  • Principle-agent problem

  • Auction

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Externality, Welfare, and Public Economics

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Part 4: Policy & Public Economics

• Chapter 32-35: Economics of the public sector

  • Welfare

  • Social planner vs Private decision

  • Externality

  • General Equilibrium

  • Public goods

  • Tax & Subsidy

• Extra topic: Environment

  • Climate change & energy policies

  • Agriculture economics

• Chapter 36: Asymmetric information & Information economics

  • Adverse Selection & Moral Hazard

• Extra topics: Health economics

  • Health insurance: pooling vs separating contracts

  • Health policy: The American healthcare vs the world

  • Public Health