• Account for the method, paradigm, and core principles of economics.
• Apply basic analytical tools such as demand and supply curves, comparative statics, and elasticity calculation to show how you can calculate the effects of changes in market conditions or public policy on prices and quantities, the efficiency of production, and the distribution of benefits and costs among participants in the economic system.
• Describe and rationalize the essential prerequisites for microeconomic models such as models for supply and demand, incomplete competition. Graphically illustrate the contents of these models as well as perform simple analyzes.
• Algebraically solve simple economic issues such as utility and profit maximization, supply demand, and algebraically determine equilibrium values of economic variables such as price, quantity and profit.
• Account for alternative industry structures (monopoly, competition, etc.), the conditions that can give rise to them, their implication for welfare and efficiency, and the scope for public policy to regulate them.
• Explain at a basic level the concepts, tools, and insights from selected areas from “modern” microeconomics – e.g. game theory and behavioural economics–and analyze how they manifest in real-world situations.

Microeconomics constitutes much of the theoretical foundation for many management fields, including strategy, marketing, finance, and international business. This course provides an introduction to the methodology, perspective, analytical style, and main theoretical insights of economics as it applies to individual organizations, industries, and markets. Micoreconomic theory can inform optimale behavour in a variety of context. Markets drive individual choices which in turn impact global outcomes such as climate change. The course aims at creating an understanding on how market structures and incentives can create and solve relevant challenges of the global economy.

Topics covered in the course include:
 

• Market supply, demand, and equilibrium
• Elasticity of demand and supply
• Rational choice and consumer theory
• Firms, Production, and Costs
• Optimal producer and consumer choices
• Competitive markets and Monopolies
• Oligopoly and Game theory

As an introduction to the basics of economics, the course provides the prerequisite for all the subsequent economics courses in the BLC programme. Together with the courses Macroeconomics and Globalization and Sustainability the course provides a broad knowledge about economics and its applications. The course is simultaneously offered to IBA students as the mandatory introduction to economics.

Please note that this course will be discontinued and run for the last time in Autumn 2024. The last exam will be offered in winter 2025.

• Jeffrey M Perloff (2018) Microeconomics, Global 8th Edition, Pearson, with online access. 
• In alternative: Microeconomics. CBS - BLC and IBA. 2nd Edition. Compiled by Orsola Garofalo
• MyEconLab training software, supplied with the purchase of the textbook.  
• Teaching notes and other material uploaded by the instructors

Please note: these reading materials are only tentative and changes may occur. Final literature lists will be uploaded on Canvas before the course begins.