The aim of the course is to familiarize students with selected topics from the field of microeconomics:
• the concept of partial equilibrium in a final goods market (shifts in the supply and demand functions, waiting in line);
• government intervention in a competitive and monopoly markets (including different forms of taxes, tariffs, import quotas, subsidies, price controls (min and max prices), quantity restrictions, intervention purchases) and their impact on prices, sales, consumer and producer surplus, economic efficiency, deadweight loss;
• the pure exchange model, the concept of general equilibrium, the Edgeworth Box, Walras’ Law, contract curve;
• fundamental concepts of welfare economics (the First Theorem of Welfare Economics and the Second Theorem of Welfare Economics);
• Comparative Advantage and Production Possibility Frontier, transformation function, and marginal rate of transformation, alternative costs;
• preference aggregation, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, social welfare criteria, and concepts of fair, just, and efficient allocation;
• externalities, distinguishing between production and consumption externalities, positive and negative externalities, methods of internalizing externalities, Coase Theorem, Pigovian taxes, and regulation.
• the concepts of public goods, common goods and club goods, rivalry and excludability, free-riding, tragedy of the commons, voting mechanisms, Borda count, and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism.
• the fundamental topics concerning asymmetric information (ex ante and ex post) – including adverse selection, moral hazard, the principal-agent model, market for lemons, educational market model, signaling.