Microeconomics: Foundations and Insights

Welcome to the Microeconomics course! This course will help you develop an in-depth understanding of the microeconomics principles and market mechanisms. It provides the tools and framework you need to understand the economy at large and decision-making at the individual unit level. In a world with infinite calls on finite resources, the choice is the central problem of public policy. The tools and techniques of economics are critical in addressing it. A microeconomic model can help you analyze and evaluate any problem associated with a choice, be it climate change, inequality, or which color jeans to buy. A choice, however, only makes sense if we are aware of the available options. The (dismal) science of economics helps there too, by hard coding limitations into these optimization efforts. This course helps you dive deep into the economic elements, even if you have little or no previous exposure to formal economics. This course enables you to use the basic framework of incentives, trade-offs, prices, markets, and underlying modern microeconomics to understand the economy at large. The economic theories from the course will help you contextualize the current pressing concerns of public policy, which will further aid in the development of a more precise formulation of policy-relevant problems and potential solutions.