ECON 201 : Microeconomics

This is an intermediate microeconomics course designed to give you a comprehensive study and understanding of various decision economic phenomena, building on simple intuition, and developing theoretical constructs, and analytical tools. The course provides a set of microeconomic models for students who are: (1) intending to advance further with economics; and/or (2) expecting to be involved in business and policy fields; and/or (3) interested in humanities and social science and ways of analysing social processes.

This course uses a concise, example-filled approach to intermediate microeconomic theory. For each concept introduced, worked-out examples are offered with step-by-step solutions. Each lecture will focus on one of the chapters of the prescribed textbook for this course, from presenting the basic theoretical elements, distilling their main ingredients, and offering the main intuition behind each formal assumption and result, up to developing many worked-out examples and related applications. The goal of this course is for each student to be able to understand and analyse microeconomics problems and acquire some essential tools for solving standard exercises, through mastering a common approach for solving similar problems. To that end, we will use simple algebra, and step-by-step derivation of each result for each model considered, so only a basic background in algebra and high-school level calculus is assumed to navigate the material covered in this course. 

There will be three take-home tests worth 15% each assigned during the semester and a final (open book) exam worth 55% toward the final grade in this course.

This course is a standard 15 point course and students are expected to spend 10 hours per week involved in each 15 point course that they are enrolled in.

For this course, you can expect 36 hours of lectures (6 hours per week),  6 hours of tutorials (one-hour of weekly tutorials), 9 hours of reading and thinking about the content (1.5 hours weekly), and 9 hours of work on assignments and/or test preparation (an average of 1.5 hours per week for self-assessment, working out solutions to problems for assignment purposes and preparing for the final exam).

It is important to note that most learning can be achieved during class and tutorial time, plus preparation for both classes and tutorials.

Lectures provide a structure to assist your study, introducing the relevant topics, concepts, tools, and providing examples and exercises for you to work on, to begin with.

Tutorial time allows you to practice with the self-assessment exercises and selected end-of-chapter exercises on a regular basis. Weekly tutorials will focus on reviewing self-assessed and selected end-of-chapter exercises. The level of difficulty of exercises chosen for either tutorial sessions or assessments (take-home tests) will be on the easier side. Even if not assessed on those, students can choose to also practice with more challenging exercises, especially if interested in pursuing further studies in economics. Regardless, the available exercises always give students ample opportunity to apply concepts from previous worked-out examples during class time.

Campus Experience

Depending on the border restrictions in place during the Summer Semester, some students might be based in New Zealand, others still overseas.

For students based in New Zealand:

• Attendance is highly recommended at scheduled activities (lectures and tutorials) to succeed in the course.
• Lectures will also be available as recordings, and so will tutorials.
• Attendance on campus is required for the final exam for those students not enrolled as 'overseas' students.
• The activities for the course are scheduled as a standard weekly timetable. 

For students based overseas:

• Listening/Reviewing both lecture and tutorial recordings on a regular basis is highly recommended for students based overseas.
• Attendance on campus is not required for the final exam for students enrolled as 'overseas students'. 
• Study material will be available at course commencement and additional material/information will be released progressively throughout the course and as needed. 
• This course runs to the University semester timetable and all the associated completion dates and deadlines will apply.

Please refer to the Canvas site for any updates and announcements about this course. Any important communication will be posted on that site for you to be informed about it promptly.