ECN 130 - Principles of Microeconomics

1. Analyze key economic concepts related to personal and societal decision-making.
   1. Define scarcity, choice, and incentives.
   2. Analyze the concepts of opportunity costs, efficiency, and growth through the Production Possibilities Frontier model.
   3. Explain marginal analysis by computing marginal costs and marginal benefits.
   4. Identify characteristics of a market economy.
2. Construct supply and demand graphs to illustrate changes in price and non-price factors.
   1. Examine price and non-price influences on buyer and seller behaviors.
   2. Predict quantity movements and shifts in supply and demand by analyzing buyers’ and sellers’ interactions in the marketplace.
   3. Explain the effect of price ceilings and price floors in the macro economy.
   4. Identify consumer and producer surplus.
3. Evaluate buyer and seller relationships using elasticity concepts.
   1. Calculate price elasticities.
   2. Examine how elasticity is used to explain buyer and seller behaviors in the marketplace.
   3. Demonstrate the relationship between elasticity and total revenue.
4. Analyze Theory of the Firm concepts including costs, revenues, and profit maximization.
   1. Utilize cost data to create cost curves.
   2. Develop short and long run cost curves to predict and explain firm behavior.
5. Compare and contrast perfectly competitive and imperfect market structures.
   1. Explain price, output, and efficiency outcomes in perfectly competitive, monopoly, and monopolistic competition market structures.
   2. Identify how oligopolies affect price and output outcomes or economic profit of a firm.
   3. Analyze how oligopolies interact to create suboptimal outcomes or economic profit for the firm.
6. Assess the role of government in a market economy.
   1. Identify positive and negative externalities.
   2. Examine various policies used to achieve socially optimum outcomes.
7. Examine private and public goods and policy.
   1. Define private and public goods.
   2. Classify public and private goods by excludability and rivalry in consumption criteria.
8. Assess the supply and demand model in relation to resource markets.
   1. Construct a labor market model.
   2. Explain capital markets.
   3. Relate the present value of money to capital markets.
9. Evaluate the economics of international trade.
   1. Examine how the principle of comparative advantage determines flow of international trade.
   2. Compare and contrast the benefits and criticisms of free trade, tariffs, and quotas.