Microeconomics: A Journey Through Life's Decisions

By John Cullis and Philip Jones
August 2009
Pearson Education
Distrubuted by Trans-Atlantic Publications Inc.
ISBN: 9780273718932
744 pages
$122.00 Paper Original

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Description

Microeconomics; a journey through life’s decisions starts with the important building blocks of microeconomic theory studied on all intermediate microeconomics courses, this text goes further than any other. It presents microeconomic theory as a debate, questions theoretical exposition, considers future developments and emphasises the social dimension of microeconomics as a framework in which economists attempt to interpret the world.

Contents

Part I The essentials of microeconomics

1  Is microeconomics ‘boring’ and ‘difficult’?

2  The ‘clever’ and ‘dumb’ consumer

3  The ‘black box’ competitor

4  Efficiency, partial equilibrium and prices

5  Efficiency, general equilibrium and equity

6  The ‘benefits’ of market intervention

7  Risk, information, insurance and uncertainty

8  Time, fundamental commodities, discounting and the economic analysis of knowledge creation

Part II The household economy

9  The economic family

10  Growing up and down: investment in human capital and labour supply incentives

Part III The firm economy

11  The imperfect ‘black box’ market forms for outputs and inputs

12  Firms with an institutional content

Part IV The public economy

13  Taxing economics

14  Public choice and political markets

Part V The voluntary economy

15  Self-interest or altruism: a broader framework

16  Do individuals really make ‘charitable’ decisions?

Part VI The international economy

17  Neoclassical microeconomics and international trade

18  Trade policy: market structure and politics

Part VII Towards ‘the big sleep’

19  Microeconomics, life and death (‘or more serious than that’?)

Features

• Challenge boxes outline the many debates in economics and question theoretical exposition.
• Each chapter focuses on the way that theory works to illuminate life’s decisions.
• Extensive references provide a gateway to further reading.

Author

John G. Cullis is Reader in Economics and Philip R. Jones is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and International Development at the University of Bath. They have published in a wide range of economics journals and are the authors of Public Finance and Public Choice: Analytical Perspectives, third edition, Oxford University Press, 2009.

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