MICROECONOMICS

Description

Students learn how to think about the myriad of real-world economic and noneconomic issues through the lens of microeconomic analysis. The elegant and powerful tools of microeconomic theory endow students with an analytical mindset and a strong quantitative preparation, which form the building blocks for understanding the foundations of microeconomic analysis. The course combines mathematical rigor and a 360-degree vision of real-world economic and social phenomena to address fascinating questions about human behavior in economic and noneconomic settings. The beauty of microeconomics. How to think like an economist. Models and data. Rational choice theory Budget and time constraints How to model tastes: indifference curves and utility functions The consumer problem: constrained optimal choice Deriving uncompensated demand functions Price, income, and cross-price elasticities Expenditure function; deriving compensated demand functions Substitution and income effects Leisure versus labor choice; the labor supply Intertemporal choice; the saving and borrowing functions Choice under uncertainty; lotteries, expected utility, risk attitudes; insurance Game theory and its applications (Nash equilibrium; subgame perfect equilibrium) Firm theory: Production and costs Cost minimization and profit maximization Equilibrium in perfectly competitive markets Market interventions in competitive markets: welfare analysis Monopoly. Price discrimination. Natural monopoly. Monopolistic competition Oligopoly (Cournot and Bertrand models; cartels and collusion) General equilibrium analysis. Pareto efficiency. Welfare theorems. Externalities and public goods. Free riding problem. The journey through microeconomics: take-home message Exchange/course-load context: The official incoming exchange catalogue states that 30xxx codes refer to undergraduate courses, 20xxx and 21xxx codes refer to graduate courses, and 50xxx codes refer to the Integrated Master of Arts in Law. Undergraduate exchange students are allowed to select undergraduate-level courses only; graduate students can choose both undergraduate and graduate level courses. Bocconi credits are ECTS-equivalent. Each Bocconi credit corresponds to 25 hours of workload, including 8 lecture hours.