This course of study will cover the microeconomic core theory in twelve weeks. The curriculum begins with preliminaries (1-2), covering scarcity, opportunity cost, the production possibilities frontier, comparative advantage, and the logic of economic systems. It then moves to supply and demand (3-5), focusing on the construction of demand and supply curves, market equilibrium, government intervention in markets, and elasticity. Following this, microeconomic decision makers (6-8) are discussed through the theory of the consumer, the theory of production and cost, and the profit-maximising firm. The core material concludes with product markets (9-10), specifically analyzing perfect competition and monopoly as the two limiting cases of market structure. Topics like 11 (monopolistic competition and oligopoly), V and VI (labour, capital and financial markets; efficiency and the role of government), and general macroeconomic content are the subject matter of Introduction to Economics II and are not examinable in this course, although they are referred to in lectures where they illuminate the material at hand.

This course is a one-semester introduction to economic reasoning for undergraduate students with no prior training in the field. Its subject is not a list of facts about the economy but a method: the small set of ideas economists use to explain how individuals, firms and markets behave when resources are scarce. Working systematically through Hall and Lieberman's Economics: Principles and Applications, the course builds that method up from a single starting point — that every choice has a cost measured in the best alternative forgone — and shows how far it can be carried: to the shape of a demand curve, the responsiveness of consumers to a tax, the cost structure of a factory, the pricing decision of a firm with market power, the valuation of an asset that pays out over time, and the welfare consequences of competition and monopoly. The emphasis throughout is on reasoning rather than memorisation. Graphs and equations are treated as instruments for thinking, not as objects to be reproduced from memory; assumptions are treated as deliberate simplifications to be examined and defended, not as claims about the world. Students who complete the course should be able to take an unfamiliar economic claim from a newspaper, a policy debate or their own experience, restate it in the language of supply, demand, cost and incentives, and say what evidence would settle it.

By the end of the semester, a student who has done the work should be able to: i. State what opportunity cost is and compute it in an unfamiliar setting, including cases where no money changes hands. ii. Distinguish a shift of a curve from a movement along it, and apply the three-step process to predict the effect of a shock on price and quantity. iii. Calculate and interpret price, income and cross-price elasticities, and use them to say who bears the burden of a tax. iv. Derive a consumer's demand curve from a budget constraint and preferences, and separate income from substitution effects. v. Construct short-run and long-run cost curves from a production function and explain their shapes. vi. Locate a firm's profit-maximising output under perfect competition and under monopoly, and read profit, loss, shutdown and exit decisions off a diagram. vii. Compare market structures on price, quantity and welfare grounds, read a simple oligopoly game, and evaluate a policy proposal aimed at market power. viii. Compute a present value and use it to value a machine, a bond, a share or an investment in education. ix. Measure consumer surplus, producer surplus and deadweight loss on a diagram, and state precisely what the resulting efficiency claim does and does not assert. x. Read a short empirical article in economics and identify its question, its data, its identifying comparison and its limitations.

Mankiw, N. G., 2021, Principles of Economics, 9th Edition