Here are 100 books that Microeconomic Theory fans have personally recommended if you like
Microeconomic Theory.
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I am Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Industrial Organization to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and mergers decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
This book is highly recommended for students in graduate programs with a strong game theory and mechanism design focus.
As MWG, it is especially technical in some chapters, but its writing is more “modern” in Introductions and other sections, helping the reader “see the forest” a bit more easily than with other books. The math appendix is also excellent and exercises are a good challenge for strong students.
I am Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Industrial Organization to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and mergers decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
The first volume examines consumer and producer theory, choice under uncertainty, and general equilibrium; while the second analyzes game theory, contract theory, and mechanism design.
These are, perhaps, the most rigorous, detailed, and advanced books of the typical topics covered in PhD Microeconomics in top institutions nowadays. While excellent for instructors, or advanced PhD students, the two volumes may be rather difficult to cover in the first-year PhD Microeconomics sequence, given their length and technicalities.
Nonetheless, both volumes will be quite helpful for instructors teaching graduate Microeconomics everywhere!
Microeconomic Foundations I develops the choice, price, and general equilibrium theory topics typically found in first-year theory sequences, but in deeper and more complete mathematical form than most standard texts provide. The objective is to take the reader from acquaintance with these foundational topics to something closer to mastery of the models and results connected to them. * Provides a rigorous treatment of some of the basic tools of economic modeling and reasoning, along with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these tools * Complements standard texts * Covers choice, preference, and utility; structural properties of preferences and…
I am Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Industrial Organization to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and mergers decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
A short presentation of consumer and producer theory (no game theory or contract theory), very rigorous, and with some interesting examples.
Challenging exam exercises at the end of the book. Last but not least, the eBook is available for free from Prof. Ariel Rubinstein’s website.
While most students may find it too succinct to be the only reference in PhD Microeconomics courses, it is probably one of the references several students use (seeking different explanations and examples) at top PhD programs.
This book presents Ariel Rubinstein's lecture notes for the first part of his well-known graduate course in microeconomics. Developed during the fifteen years that Rubinstein taught the course at Tel Aviv University, Princeton University, and New York University, these notes provide a critical assessment of models of rational economic agents, and are an invaluable supplement to any primary textbook in microeconomic theory. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Rubinstein retains the striking originality and deep simplicity that characterize his famously engaging style of teaching. He presents these lecture notes with a precision that gets to the core of…
I am a Professor of Economics at Washington State University. My research focuses on applying Game Theory and Industrial Organization models to polluting industries and other regulated markets. I analyze how firms strategically respond to environmental regulation, including their output and pricing decisions, their investments in clean technologies, and merger decisions, both under complete and incomplete information contexts.
An excellent game theory book for graduate students, especially for Master's students taking second-year elective courses on game theory, and even technical enough for the first-year Ph.D. Microeconomics course (since most schools spend most of the second semester covering game theory, contract theory, and applications.)
Rigorous, with detailed definitions and notation, yet accessible to senior undergraduate students at top schools (with a strong math background) or Master's students.
This comprehensive textbook introduces readers to the principal ideas and applications of game theory, in a style that combines rigor with accessibility. Steven Tadelis begins with a concise description of rational decision making, and goes on to discuss strategic and extensive form games with complete information, Bayesian games, and extensive form games with imperfect information. He covers a host of topics, including multistage and repeated games, bargaining theory, auctions, rent-seeking games, mechanism design, signaling games, reputation building, and information transmission games. Unlike other books on game theory, this one begins with the idea of rationality and explores its implications for…
When understanding the interactions in our economy, it is critical to recognize all participants in this complex system. I’m passionate about microeconomics because it provides me with a different perspective to examine the world around me. I use my microeconomic glasses and I enjoy rationalizing the daily interactions and predicting the potential outcomes.
This is a widely used book in introduction to microeconomics courses in colleges around the world, from the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.
The book assumes no algebra or calculus, other than elementary arithmetic, thus being appropriate for students from different backgrounds.
Each chapter is well motivated with real-life problems and data, followed by a basic, intuitive, explanation of how microeconomics helps us model and understand the tradeoff that individuals or firms face in that setting.
Highly recommended for students with little math background.
When it comes to explaining current economic conditions, there is no economist readers trust more than New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Term after term, Krugman is earning that same level of trust in the classroom, with more and more instructors introducing students to the fundamental principles of economics via Krugman’s signature storytelling style. The new Third Edition of Paul Krugman and Robin Wells’s Economics is their most accomplished yet—extensively updated to offer new examples and stories, new case studies from the business world, and expert coverage of the ongoing financial crisis. Watch a video interview of…
When understanding the interactions in our economy, it is critical to recognize all participants in this complex system. I’m passionate about microeconomics because it provides me with a different perspective to examine the world around me. I use my microeconomic glasses and I enjoy rationalizing the daily interactions and predicting the potential outcomes.
This is a classic reference for students learning microeconomic theory, both in economics and business degrees.
It offers a nice combination of motivating real-life examples, rigor, figures, and intuitive explanations.
Because it avoids mathematical details in most chapters, it is often used in introductory courses, helping get students “hungry for more” in next courses, such as intermediate or advanced microeconomics.
However, it assumes a bit more mathematical background than Krugman and Wells’ book (presented above), so it can be used as the main reference for introductory courses if students have some basic algebra.
Microeconomics and its role in decision making and public policy
Microeconomics exposes readers to topics that play a central role in microeconomics. From game theory and competitive strategy, to the roles of uncertainty and information, and the analysis of pricing by firms with market power, the text helps you understand what's going on in the world of business. It also shows you how microeconomics can be used as a practical tool for decision-making and for designing and understanding public policy. The 9th Edition further illustrates microeconomics' relevance and usefulness with new…
I am a reader of primary texts. One can be dismayed by the number of followers’ easy reliance on secondary literature to create interpretations of their leader’s economic ideas about the sources of society’s well-being. Distortive alteration and the recycling of unfounded ideas about conflicting influential economists’ theories is actually counterproductive. Only scrutiny of an author’s work can reveal false assertions. I’m proposing four authors I’ve scrutinised to find out what they really thought about my main teaching interests: money and credit, and their impact on prices, and the manipulation of the volume of either/both to affect purchasing power. It has been astounding to learn what theory applications, distorting their intent, bear their name.
Hicks envisaged an economy in which individuals choose to offer labour for income to purchase products of their effort or to spend time in uncompensated leisure.
His is a theorical economy: individuals and firms interact to determine current and future supplies and demands. It establishes the laws governing the price system regulating exchange and production.
In this world of transparent, free movement of goods and resources without government, regulations, banks, and unions, there is no room for monopolies or capital accumulation.
Money as intermediary is simply a unit of account. Growth is the outcome of needs, efforts, and mutual cooperation.
Value and Capital, a jewel, is the core of current microeconomics, but Hicks’ economy, in which inflation and income disparities are non-issues, is not a capitalist but a market one; ironically present microeconomists conflate the two.
I’ve been drawn to philosophical inquiry for as long as I can remember (even before knowing philosophy was a thing, which I didn’t realize until after high school). My most enduring interest is in inquiry concerning rationality and irrationality. My early studies focused on the relationship between morality and rationality. My current research focuses on choice situations and preference structures that can interfere with choosing well by prompting self-defeating patterns of choice. The relevant patterns are associated with being tempted or torn and include cases of individual and collective procrastination. Though not a cure-all, understanding rationality’s guidance can, I think, highlight certain pitfalls in life and help us avoid them.
This collection explores a fascinating and currently highly relevant puzzle concerning cases in which the contribution of a single individual will not make the difference between success and failure with respect to a certain important goal (e.g., achieving decent air quality) because the contribution (e.g., walking to the store instead of driving) is too insignificant given the scale of the goal.
In such cases, it might seem not only tempting but permissible or even required that the individual refrain from contributing and instead spend her energy and resources in some more effective way (so as to actually make a difference with respect to some morally or rationally important goal).
Yet, if all reason in this way and refrain from contributing, the important collective goal will not be achieved at all.
The papers collected here represent the most recent work on a much neglected problem in practical reasoning. It is the problem of imperceptible harms and benefits. It is perhaps better to characterize the problem as a collection of puzzles or paradoxes, since those who deny the existence (or possibility) of imperceptible decrements (or increments) face problems no less perplexing than those who affinn their existence. The puzzles and paradoxes combine very practical and pressing worries about our obligations to relieve starvation, mitigate suffering and conserve resources, with deep metaethical worries about the nature of practical rationality. I use these brief…
When understanding the interactions in our economy, it is critical to recognize all participants in this complex system. I’m passionate about microeconomics because it provides me with a different perspective to examine the world around me. I use my microeconomic glasses and I enjoy rationalizing the daily interactions and predicting the potential outcomes.
This is a funny exploration of the popular TV series, showing how each episode is packed with microeconomics topics, including comparative advantage, demand and supply, costs, market imperfections, and government interventions.
It even includes several references to macroeconomics, including growth, labor markets, and inequality.
Readers can also consider other titles in this series, based on their taste of popular culture, including Superheroes and Economics, Seinfeld and Economics, and The Beatles and Economics, among others.
This book provides an in-depth look at the primary foundations of economics explored through the lens of the Pawnee Department of Parks and Recreation. Each episode of the hit television series, Parks and Recreation, includes material to help an eager learner understand the basics of one of the most fascinating fields of study.
Whether you've wondered how economists determine specialization or why fast-food restaurants continue to pop up around your neighborhood, the same situations have occurred in Pawnee. Each chapter highlights key scenes or major episodes that demonstrate how the characters experience economics in exactly the same way the rest…
Microeconomics is a turnoff to most readers. Not without reason. Many books in this field are dull rewrites of other books and opaque. In particular, it is not clear how the behavior of individual consumers and producers adds to the performance—good or bad—of an economy. The books listed here helped me to sharpen my own mind and to make my writing lucid.
Like Ayn Rand, Wassily Leontief is a Jew who left the Soviet Union and settled in the United States.
However, he does not believe in free markets and even is a specialist in economic planning. The precision with which he analyzes the economic system, considering it as machine that transforms inputs into outputs is mind-boggling and answers difficult questions.
Wassily Leontief (1905-1999) was the founding father of input-output economics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1973. This book offers a collection of papers in memory of Leontief by his students and close colleagues. The first part, 'Reflections on Input-Output Economics', focuses upon Leontief as a person and scholar as well as his personal contributions to economics. It includes contributions by Nobel Laureate Paul A. Samuelson who shares his memories of a young Professor Leontief at Harvard and ends with the last joint interview with Wassily and his wife, to date previously unpublished. The second part, 'Perspectives of…
