Lecture Notes on Microeconomics

2016 This publication is the result of the project M lodzi projektuj a zarz adzanie co-financed by the European Social Fund within Human Capital Operational Programme, Priority IV ” Higher education and science, ” Measure 4.1 ” Strengthening and development of didactic potential of universities and increasing the number of graduates from faculties of key importance for knowledge-based economy, ” Sub-measure 4.1.1 ” Strengthening and development of didactic potential of universities. ” Publisher: Szkoo la G lówna Handlowa w Warszawie (SGH) Preface These notes are prepared for the Microeconomic courses I teach at the Warsaw School of Economics. They are aimed to serve as a supplementary material for Microeco-nomic course at the introductory or intermediate level. The material covers canonical first level microeconomic topics including: consumer and producer choice, as well as competitive and monopolistic (partial) equilibrium analysis. If time allows (and it usually did during 15 meetings, hour and a half each) I also recommend to cover additional topics including: choice under uncertainty, introduction to non-cooperative games, selected issues from industrial organization or externalities (including analysis of public goods). Finally to introduce the reader to more advanced microeconomic topics I have prepared two short chapters on general equilibrium analysis as well as economics of asymmetric information. These are, however, only sketched here. The selection of material covered can depend also on major taught, and can vary between economics, finance or management. Each chapter includes a separate section with (subjectively selected) references to some important further readings. Finally, although material presented here is usually more than enough to cover during a standard one semester course, some important economic topics / disciplines are missing here (including public choice, mechanism design, cooperative game theory to mention just a few). Clearly, the notes are far from being complete and cannot compensate for reading a full textbook on Microeconomics. One reason is that some (important) details are missing here. Firstly, whenever not restrictive to present the main argument I use standard tools from constrained optimization for differentiable objectives and constraining functions, hence ” non-smooth ” /discrete case is not covered here. Secondly, as the exposition is mainly aimed to show the basic trade-offs but not solve all the problems, I only occasionally discuss the second order optimality conditions. Thirdly, when presenting some theorems or statements I miss their proofs but give a reference for such or sketch an argument when necessary.