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Published:
March 21, 2016

Microeconomics For Dummies - UK

Overview

Your one-stop guide to understanding Microeconomics

Microeconomics For Dummies (with content specific to the UK reader) is designed to help you understand the economics of individuals. Using concise explanations and accessible content that tracks directly to an undergraduate course, this book provides a student-focused course supplement with an in-depth examination of each topic. This invaluable companion provides clear information and real-world examples that bring microeconomics to life and introduces you to all the key concepts. From supply and demand to market competition, you'll understand how the economy works on an individual level, and how it affects you every day. Before long, you'll be conversant in consumers, costs, and competition.

Microeconomics is all about the behaviour of individual people and

individual firms. It sounds pretty straightforward, but it gets complicated early on. You may not be an economist, but if you're a business student at university, the odds are you need to come to grips with microeconomics. That's where Microeconomics For Dummies comes in, walking you through the fundamental concepts and giving you the understanding you need to master the material.

  • Understand supply, demand, and equilibrium
  • Examine the consumer decision making process
  • Delve into elasticity and costs of production
  • Learn why competition is healthy and monopolies are not

Even the brightest business students can find economics intimidating, but the material is essential to a solid grasp of how the business world works. The good news is that you've come to the right place.

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About The Author

Daniel Richards, PhD, is a professor of economics at Tufts University. He received his PhD from Yale University.

Manzur Rashid, PhD, has taught economics at University College London and Cambridge University.

Peter Antonioni is a senior teaching fellow at University College London.

Sample Chapters

microeconomics for dummies - uk

CHEAT SHEET

Microeconomics is that part of economics that looks at the world from the perspective of consumers and firms — asking how they make their decisions and how those decisions come together to make different kinds of markets. You do that by building models of different situations that explore the results of different types of conditions.

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Articles from
the book

Microeconomics has shot off into all sorts of areas, looking at all kinds of questions — from how people select marriage partners to whether financial markets are inherently unstable. Here are ten areas where you can add to your knowledge of microeconomics and put it into practice, helping you to understand some of the deeper problems of technology, society and organisation.
Understanding why markets fail is a key element in understanding microeconomics. Markets can fail for a number of different reasons, but the two most common are when a market provides something society doesn’t want, or doesn’t provide something society does want. Other reasons include the following: Information: If consumers and producers do not have complete information then the problem is called asymmetric information.
The financial crisis caused many economists to re-examine a lot of old questions in microeconomics. One is the extent to which people are rational in the economic sense ‒ choosing the best they can do for the budget they have. If they aren’t, a number of results, like the predictions of what kind of equilibria will exist in a market, can’t work ‒ and you have to throw out over 100 years of research into microeconomics.
In reality, companies are often very complex entities. In microeconomics, the main difference is that large companies tend to be owned by one set of people — shareholders — and managed by another — the professional managers they hire. Deciding how vital shareholders are to a company is an important question, and the answer isn’t as obvious as it may seem.
Microeconomists compare different types of market depending on the number of firms in the market, the ease of entering the market and the degree to which products sold are similar. There are four main types are: Perfect Competition: A very large number of firms sell to a very large number of consumers. Firms make an identical product, and consumers are perfectly informed about prices and quantities.
Microeconomics is that part of economics that looks at the world from the perspective of consumers and firms — asking how they make their decisions and how those decisions come together to make different kinds of markets. You do that by building models of different situations that explore the results of different types of conditions.
Absolutely no one in the world is an expert on the future, because (in case you hadn’t noticed) it hasn’t happened yet. Enter microeconomics. Not knowing the future is a big problem if, for instance, you need to make an investment that may take 25 years to pay off, such as drilling an oil well or building a train network.
Many of the markets that most fascinate microeconomists concern information technology. Information has a strange economic property in that the marginal cost of getting a piece of information to an extra person is now zero. This change is because new forms of dissemination — via the Internet — have taken away the cost of shipping items as books, records, video tapes (remember them!
Microeconomics comes complete with its own set of vocabulary, which can sometimes be confusing. To get a true feel for microeconomics, three key terms must be defined and understood. Those terms are: Utility: Utility is the value people get from making a choice. You can find out how much utility a consumer gains by working it out from the choice they make.
The prisoner’s dilemma can help you better understand microeconomics. In the prisoner’s dilemma, two people are arrested for a crime and put in separate rooms so that they can’t communicate. The authorities make the same offer to both, one that means that their best option if they could communicate is unattainable.
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