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Professor Leontief at Harvard and ends with the last joint interview with Wassily and his wife, to date previously unpublished.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…
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.
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…
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…
I am passionate about the dissemination of economic ideas both inside and outside university spaces. In addition to classroom lectures at my university, I give a lot of public lectures on economics. Through these talks, I introduce the audience to the tradition of doing economics using a critical perspective. I have an MA and MPhil in Economics from the University of Hyderabad and a PhD in Economics from the University of Sydney.
I first purchased and read this book as a senior undergraduate student not knowing anything about the author.
Little did I know that this book would later play an important role in not only understanding the limitations of mainstream economics but also in providing me with an alternative approach to make sense of our economic surroundings.
Bharadwaj’s book is truly a classic and one that I always recommend to my students.
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.
This book is an extremely rigorous and formal presentation of Game Theory concepts to Ph.D. students.
The chapters about complete information games and repeated games are particularly superb relative to other advanced books in this field. It also offers chapters on cooperative games, which is quite uncommon in other books (both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.)
The coverage of signaling games, Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium, and equilibrium refinements is relatively brief compared to most other topics in the book, but the book is still great.
Now in its second edition, this popular textbook on game theory is unrivalled in the breadth of its coverage, the thoroughness of technical explanations and the number of worked examples included. Covering non-cooperative and cooperative games, this introduction to game theory includes advanced chapters on auctions, games with incomplete information, games with vector payoffs, stable matchings and the bargaining set. This edition contains new material on stochastic games, rationalizability, and the continuity of the set of equilibrium points with respect to the data of the game. The material is presented clearly and every concept is illustrated with concrete examples from…
I have always been curious about why societies develop, which is why I was drawn to the social sciences as a student. I first encountered attempts to explain development in economics, but found that mainstream models were too neat and abstract to account for my everyday observations. Why are there no entrepreneurs in the models, and why do most economists assume that property rights are unambiguous? I eventually discovered that non-mainstream economic theories and some of the other social sciences are more concerned with reality. Eventually I developed an eclectic framework with a focus on entrepreneurship, institutions, and spatial agglomerations as factors that shape socio-economic development.
This is the second book that I read about entrepreneurship. It’s also my second favorite book on economics.
Unlike Schumpeter, Kirzner does not assume that entrepreneurship is an unusual activity. Most people are entrepreneurial at some point. Successful entrepreneurship means being alert to profit opportunities that others have not noticed.
The underlying message is that there is such a thing as a free lunch. Kirzner views the market as a process rather than an equilibrium state. It is a superb book for understanding why mainstream neoclassical economics is unrealistic, but it does not address uncertainty.
Stressing verbal logic rather than mathematics, Israel M. Kirzner provides at once a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, an essay on the theory of entrepreneurship, and an essay on the theory of competition. Competition and Entrepreneurship offers a new appraisal of quality competition, of selling effort, and of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary welfare economics.
Kirzner's book establishes a theory of the market and the price system which differs from orthodox price theory. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. Mr. Kirzner argues that "it is more…
I grew up in the 1950s next door to Long Island’s iconic Levittown. All my aunts and uncles lived in similar modest suburbs, and I assumed everyone else did, too. Maybe that explains why America’s sharp economic U-turn in the 1970s so rubbed me the wrong way. We had become, in the mid-20th century, the first major nation where most people—after paying their monthly bills—had money left over. Today we rate as the world’s most unequal major nation. Our richest 0.1 percent hold as much wealth as our bottom 90 percent. I’ve been working with the Institute for Public Studies, as co-editor of Inequality.org, to change all that.
Our nation’s most insightful—and readable—sociologist? Boston College’s Juliet Schorr has my vote.
Over the past quarter-century, Schor has probably done more than anyone else in the world to bring grand conceptual constructs like income distribution down to the nitty-gritty of daily life.
Her 1999 best-seller,The Overspent American, strikingly exposes how inequality unleashes a “competitive consumption” dynamic that has us consuming ever more and enjoying life ever less. And that dynamic poses more dangers today than ever before.
As Schor put it in an interview with her I did some years back, we have “no chance” at achieving ecological sustainability “with the kind of extreme income distribution” that we have today.
An in-depth look at the corruption of the American Dream, the follow-up to the the Overworked American examines the consumer lives of Americans and the pitfalls of keeping up with the Joneses. Schor explains how and why the purchases of others in our social and professional communities can put pressure on us to spend more than we can afford to, how television viewing can undermine our ability to save, and why even households with good incomes have taken on so much debt for so many products they dont need and often dont even want.
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…
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 eBook, developed by faculty members from top institutions, is available for free from the developers’ website, offers several online resources, it's frequently updated, translated to several languages, and has been widely adopted in several countries.
The book includes both the usual topics for courses on introduction to microeconomics and introduction to macroeconomics, using a similar writing style as other introductory textbooks (assumes no mathematical background), thus being accessible to a wide range of students.
Unlike similar books, however, it structures topics differently: instead of presenting chapters according to the main tool or concept being introduced, chapters are presented according to real-world problems.
While this can help motivate each chapter, it may require some adapting from the instructor’s teaching style.
The only introductory economics text to equip students to address today's pressing problems by mastering the conceptual and quantitative tools of contemporary economics.
OUP has partnered with the international collaborative project of CORE researchers and teachers to bring students a book and learning system that complements and enhances CORE's open-access online e-book.
The Economy: - is a new approach that integrates recent developments in economics including contract theory, strategic interaction, behavioural economics and financial instability - Engages with issues students of economics care about, exploring inequality, climate change, economic instability, wealth creation and innovation, among other issues. - provides a…
