teaching

Intermediate Microeconomics

I've been teaching Micro 2 (Intermediate Microeconomics) for the last few years. My feeling is that we've been doing this the same way, all over the place, for the last 20 or 30 years. And while new Intermediate Microeconomics textbooks arrive each year, the outline of each of them is very similar. I've been talking to colleagues, here at UNSW and elsewhere to gather their views on teaching Micro 2. Those who have taught it acknowledge it's a hard course to teach. The common denominator is that, as one of the main purposes of the course is to teach students techniques, they - the students - find it hard to swallow. Why not try something different? Research universities put more emphasis on, well, research, and redeveloping a course is very costly and has potentially little payback.

With my promotion to Associate Professor now behind me, I want to do things differently and have proposed an alternative pathway. I'll try to post the material I develop here - all preliminary and in the "read-at-your-own-risk" category - with the hope of getting as much feedback as possible. So, if you happen to be interested and find something you like (or dislike), please send me an email.

My ideal Micro 2 course will permit delivering content using a mix of formats: text, predominantly (as in a traditional textbook), with some problem sets; but also online quizzes, interactive graphs and figures to represent concepts, video explanations, etc. Ideally, all this content delivered in a single platform. I know, right?

So I'm taking baby steps. The first one is the outline of the course I propose to develop, which can be found here.

The second (and third and fourth) is to develop some of the material in a 'textbook' format to get feedback, both from students and from well-intented colleagues who are willing to spend some time reading it. I have a long way to go, so don't hold your breath.

Here's how I start the course (check the pdf at the end of the paragraph)

Preferences in a Flat World

You may have heard that economics is all about solving scarcity problems. In other words, we usually hear (or say) that the fundamental question that underlies most, if not all, of microeconomics is the following: how does one best allocate scarce resources that have multiple, o en competing, uses? Examples abound:

    • you have a limited amount of hours during a day to devote to several activities;

    • Barcelona FC must decide which players to add to its roaster before the transfer window closes;

    • a new couple who is moving together has to select where to live;

  • you need to decide whether to buy the new iPhone (and perhaps a new case to go with it) or upgrade your laptop; and so on.

In all these examples, there is a limited resource (usually income or wealth, but not necessarily so) to allocate to multiple options. While this is a good catch phrase, it leaves a fundamental aspect unmentioned. To judge what is the best possible way to allocate resources, we need to understand what motivates the decision maker (individuals, but also families, firms, organizations, governments, etc). In other words, we need to frame the allocation problem as a decision problem. For now I will refer to the protagonist of a decision problem just as the decision maker, and I treat this decision maker as one single entity even if in some cases (as in the couple’s problem) there are more than two people involved in the decision. Later in the course we will expand decision problems to include situations where different actors interact with each other and a ect each other’s outcomes. But for now let’s focus on individual agents.

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