• Explain basic economic terminology (as e.g. opportunity costs) in a comprehensive and intuitive way.
• Describe and justify the main assumptions behind simple economic models as e.g. the demand and supply model, the perfect competition model, the monopoly model, etc.
• Illustrate diagrammatically these models and perform policy experiments (e.g. introducing taxes).
• Derive numerically economic instruments and learn how to use them in practice (e.g. price elasticity, Lerner Index, etc.).
• Solve algebraically simple microeconomic models in order to determine the equilibrium economic variables, and reflect on the solutions with a critical mind.
• Use economic intuition to explain topical policy issues (e.g. why are housing taxes popular among economists?).

This course provides an introduction to the functioning of economic markets: it describes what lies behind the notions of demand and supply. Emphasis is placed on the behavioural assumptions that generate demand for particular products, and on whether the producers of a particular product compete in a perfect or an imperfect way. We also explore important extensions to the basic model such as uncertainty and asymmetric information. The main blocks of the curriculum are:

Supply and Demand; Consumer theory: preferences, rationality assumptions, budgetary constraints; Extensions: Uncertainty and information economics, Producer theory: production and costs functions; Market structure: perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, oligopoly.