In Intermediate Microeconomics, we study the behavior of people as manifest in market conditions (demand, supply, prices, quantities) and, to a lesser degree, social outcomes. The primary objective of the course is to learn, and learn to work with, standard idealized models of those markets and behaviors as a foundation for later study and understanding of the myriad ways in which actual market conditions deviate from the ideal.

Prerequisite: ECON 2010 and one semester of calculus.

The course style balances lecture and discussion in both the bi-weekly lecture and the weekly discussion meetings.  That is, you should be prepared to discuss in the "lecture" meetings and your Teaching Assistant will also do some presentation in the "discussion" sections.  This is a smaller section than most for this course, and we will strive for as much interaction as possible as we work through the material.

Our text for the course is Microeconomics: an Intuitive Approach with Calculus, by Thomas Nechyba (Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2011).  As the title suggests, the book and this course will include the use of calculus, but our overall approach will stress economic concepts and rhetorical, graphical and algebraic ways of building our understanding of those concepts.

If you purchase a NEW copy of the textbook, you will have one semester’s worth of access to the publisher’s “LiveGraphs” website.  I highly recommend that you take advantage of this resource.  If you are at all a visual learner (as I am) you will find the animated version of the graphs, including audio descriptions, to be very helpful.  I may use a couple of these in lecture, but you will want the full set. If you purchase a used copy of the textbook, you can purchase access to LiveGraphs separately for about $50.00. An eBook version of the text bundled with LiveGraphs costs about $110.

See “Supplements” at: http://www.cengage.com/search/productOverview.do?Ntt=1896216928108951237421064455981387053964&N=16+4294922239+4294966644+21+4294966403&Ntk=P_EPI.