Syllabus and Introduction

Intermediate Microeconomics (Econ 100A)

UCSC - 2020

Professor

Kristian López Vargas

  • Email: klopezva@ucsc.edu

About me

  • Assistant Professor – Economics UCSC

  • My field of work: Micro, Behav. & Exp. Econ

  • PhD in Economics from the Univ. of Maryland

  • Prev. experience: MEF, WB, IADB, UMD, Tel. Reg.

  • Taught microeconomics before

Why take this class?

  • This course gives you tools to understand better how consumers and firms make decisions, and how market prices are determined (just the beginning).

  • It will sharpen your reasoning to determine if a certain action is “optimal” (best action / policy)

  • Examples:

    • Policy: Do we increase the minimum wage? If so, by how much?

    • Private Sector: What is the optimal price for a product. Is my company allocating its resources efficiently? Can we make/do more stuff with the same resources? Can we lower our costs while having the same output?

See Syllabus

Introduction

What is Microeconomics

  • Microeconomics is the study of how individual economic decision-makers such as consumers, workers, firms or managers allocate scarce resources among alternate uses.

  • This study involves both the behavior of these economic agents on their own and the way such behavior interacts and aggregates to form larger entities such as markets.

Two basic postulates:

  • Rational Choice: Each person tries to choose the best alternative available to him or her.

  • Equilibrium: Market price adjusts until quantity demanded equals quantity supplied. More generally: state or condition of a system that will continue as long as the acting forces in the remain in balance.

  • Examples: Housing Prices; UBER.

Thanks