Ana Espinola-Arredondo and Felix Muñoz-Garcia, faculty members in the School of Economic Sciences, have written a newly published textbook on microeconomic theory, which explores how people, companies, and communities make economic decisions on the use of their scarce, precious resources.
Microeconomics helps people systematically understand consumer choices and firm behavior, as well as market outcomes when firms selling different types of goods compete. It also provides a rigorous tool to anticipate how consumers, firms, and markets are affected by different government regulations.
Designed for rigorous undergraduate and graduate courses, and published by the MIT Press, “Intermediate Microeconomic Theory” covers consumer theory; substitution and income effect; welfare gain or loss from a price change; and choice under uncertainty.
Shifting to firm theory, the book discusses production functions, cost minimization, perfectly competitive markets, and monopolies. Two chapters on game theory provide building blocks for later chapters on imperfect markets; games of incomplete information and auctions; contract theory; and externalities, public goods, and common pool resources.
Espinola-Arredondo and Muñoz-Garcia’s text is shorter than most books at the Intermediate Microeconomics level. It provides step-by-step calculations and algebra support, presents behavioral economics applications in most chapters, as well as hundreds of examples and self-assessment exercises, and offers tools and methods that students can use to solve similar exercises on their own, making it ideal for flipped classroom, online courses, and remote teaching.
The authors co-wrote an accompanying text, “Practice Exercises for Intermediate Microeconomic Theory,” which includes resources and answers to more than 300 exercises in their textbook.
Order the texts on the MIT Press website:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/intermediate-microeconomic-theory
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/practice-exercises-intermediate-microeconomic-theory
Espinola-Arredondo is a professor and associate director of the School. She studies environmental economics, game theory, industrial organization, and applied microeconomics.
Professor Muñoz-Garcia studies microeconomic and game theory, industrial organization, and public and environmental economics.