 |
| Detailed information |
| Pre-requisites |
(*)keine
|
| Original study plan |
Bachelor's programme Economics and Business 2025W |
| Learning Outcomes |
Competences |
| The students are able to identify microeconomic principles in individual and professional decision-making and analyze policy interventions. The students are capable of adequately evaluating (future) economic challenges, such as digital, social, and environmental transformation.
Course Objectives
- Introduce students to fundamental microeconomic questions
- Enable students to understand market mechanisms and outcomes using mathematical models
- Introduce students to a methodological toolkit for reading, understanding, and analyzing graphical representations of economic relationships
- Develop the ability to critically analyze policy interventions
- Enable the application of microeconomic principles to real-world problems
- Introduce students to various areas of microeconomic research, such as competition policy, health economics, family, education, and labor
|
|
| Skills |
Knowledge |
| Learning Outcome 4 (LO4): Be able to solve and interpret microeconomic models using mathematical approaches.
Learning Outcome 5 (LO5): Be able to predict consumer and producer behavior using the concepts of utility and profit maximization.
Learning Outcome 6 (LO6): Be able to forecast the effects of policy interventions on welfare in various areas of the economy.
|
Learning Outcome 1 (LO1): Internalization of the fundamental concepts of demand, supply, and market equilibrium in microeconomics (see course topics).
Learning Outcome 2 (LO2): Internalization of the concepts of welfare economics and the trade-offs between efficiency and equity.
Topics:
- Supply and demand (scarcity and surplus, market equilibrium)
- Elasticities (formal calculation of elasticities)
- Preferences and budget constraints (utility function, indifference curves)
- Optimal demand (utility maximization)
- Demand function and consumer surplus (price changes, substitution and income effects)
- Production function (average and marginal productivity, economies of scale)
- Costs (average, marginal, and total costs, short-run and long-run costs)
- Profit maximization (marginal revenue, short-run and long-run optimization)
- Supply function and producer surplus
- Welfare analysis (policy interventions)
- Monopoly (differences from competitive equilibrium, market power)
- Monopolistic competition and oligopoly (Cournot, Stackelberg, and Bertrand equilibria)
|
|
| Criteria for evaluation |
Students receive one point for each (of 25) examples they are willing to present and discuss during the course. The solution a student offers does not have to be completely correct, but if selected for the presentation, they must present a well-prepared solution and discuss it together with the course instructor and peers.
At the end of the semester, there will be a written exam with a maximum of 75 points. The points from the exam and the assignments are combined and translated into the following grading scale:
| points | grade |
|---|
| 89 - 100 | 1 |
| 76 - 88 | 2 |
| 63 - 75 | 3 |
| 50 - 62 | 4 |
| 0 - 49 | 5 |
|
| Methods |
The course combines several teaching methods to:
- 1. Inspire and motivate students regarding the relevance of microeconomic issues.
- 2. Achieve the learning objectives using modern didactic methods.
These include, among others:
- 1. Lectures, reviews, and in-depth discussions of the content from the course "Introduction to Microeconomics."
- 2. Homework exercises that are to be presented and discussed in class.
|
| Language |
German / English |
| Study material |
slides and book: Robert S. Pindyck and Daniel L. Rubinfeld. “Microeconomics”, Pearson, Prentice Hall, 7th Edition.
|
| Changing subject? |
No |
|
