ECO11 (ver8) MICROECONOMICS 1 STUDY GUIDE ECO11 MICROECONOMICS 1 STUDY GUIDE © University of South Australia 2009 This work was printed from camera-ready copy submitted by the Unit Coordinator. The Flexible Learning Centre of the University of South Australia was not involved in its production. CONTENTS Contents 3 Introduction 5 An introduction to the economic perspective 13 Demand and supply 17 Elasticity 21 Market applications 25 The behaviour of firms and costs 31 Perfect competition 37 Monopoly 43 Monopolistic competition 47 Oligopoly 51 Economic performance, market failure and government intervention 55 Appendix: Guide to working …show more content…
Economic ideas provide a conceptual framework for understanding the forces that shape our personal and public lives. Economies (people!), faced with scarcities, have to make decisions about the way resources are allocated. First, they have to decide what goods and services have to be made and how they are to be made. Then they have to decide how much of each good and service to produce as well as who receives the proceeds of production in what proportions. These inter-connected allocation and distribution decisions must be resolved so that production and satisfaction can simultaneously occur. The complex system of human values, shared beliefs and accepted behaviour associated with the resolution of allocation and distribution decisions is known as an economic system. Economic systems have varied from the traditional systems based on beliefs and social hierarchies, to planned or command economics through to a mixture of market and planned systems of production and exchange. Economic systems are judged in terms of their efficiency and equity. Criticisms of planned systems invariably focus on aspects of inefficiency. Criticisms of market behaviour are invariably driven by equity considerations. This unit does not examine economic systems on the large scale (this is the area called macroeconomics) but rather,
Economic systems are the ways in which societies are organized to satisfy the needs and wants of people within them. With economies there are many conflicting ideologies; evidently the mixed economy and the command economy. There are a variety of ways to compare economies from the role of governments, economic growth, size of economy, employment and unemployment, quantity of life to environmental quality.
What is the main purpose of the economic system? The main purpose of the economic system is method used to produce and distribute goods and service. The three economic questions are: “What goods should be produced?” “How should these goods and services be produced” And “Who consumes these goods and services?” The characteristic of a market economics is that self-interest is the motivating force in the free market, self regulating market. The interaction of buyers and sellers motivated by self-interest and regulated by competition, all happen without a central plan. In a market economy, economic decisions are made by individuals and are based on exchange or trade. However, characteristics of a command economic
Economics is the study of how scare resources are used to produce the different things and services that people use. Economic systems are the pathways where communities allocate resources to produce different products and how they use to distribute them towards people. Some economic systems are more efficient in terms of allocating resources than others.
The table gives the supply schedules for jet-ski rides by three owners: Rick, Sam, and Tom, the only suppliers of jet-ski rides.
One of the issues that economists fail to discuss, then, is the fact that market-oriented economics is merely an artifact of our own social structure and that the grounding concepts of economics are quite different. Indeed, the grounding concepts of economics deal with the fact that people need to produce food, shelter, and clothing for their survival and that "economics" is born within the formation of any arrangement to solve the survival problem. The essential factors are production and distribution by and within the community. Economics, in other words, is part of the culture of any surviving community.
Michigan has an abundant supply of fresh water. However, an economist would consider it a scarce resource because
Economic systems are organized way in which a state or nation allocates its resources and apportions goods and services in the national community. An economic system is slackly defined as country’s plan for its services, goods produced, and the exact way in which its economic plan is carried out. There are three types of economic systems exist, they are command economy, market economy, and mixed economy. Command economy is also sometimes called planned economy. The expectations of this type of economy is that all major decisions that related to the construction or production, distribution, commodity and service prices are all made by the government. However, in market economy, national and state governments play a
“It is as important to examine what we forgo, as well as what we will get if we choose one alternative over another.” In other words, before a change is implemented into an economy, careful consideration of all other alternatives and their possible outcomes must be thoroughly examined. However, unforeseen outcomes often arise due to the imperfectability of humans.
Although my exposure to economics consists of only two introductory classes, I am fascinated by the allocation of resources, through people’s incentives, to reach an equilibrium. From the specialized courses offered, I hope to obtain an understanding of the global economy and apply these theoretical concepts to solving real-world
There are many different economic systems around the world that are tailored to fit the needs of each and every country. Command Economy, Mixed Economy, Market Economy, Traditional Economy and Free Enterprise are a few. These systems help round and establish our world today and create our future.
Historically, economics has focused on the study of the distribution, production, and allocation of scarce goods, and how firms and individuals make decisions while inevitably facing trade-offs between costs and benefits. Economics has slowly evolved as a discourse community characteristic of quantitative theories that seek to set the stage in which economic and political policies and decisions can be diffused through the nation and the world. The field of economics is a discourse community whose purposes are to quantitatively analyze economic research questions, come up with hypotheses, construct models and equations to test the hypotheses’ validity and argue about its findings. Economic scientists and professionals gather and publish their
External circumstances whether positive or negative can influence the supply and demand of Delta and the airline industry. No matter how good or bad the economic market conditions are they will always have an impact on how Delta deals with specific situations, such as aircraft malfunctions and crashes due to human error or technological problems.
3. Macroeconomics – the branch of economics that studies the relationship among broad economic aggregates like national income, national output, money supply, bank deposits, total volumes of savings, investment, consumption expenditure, general price level of commodities, government spending, inflation, recession, employment, and money supply.
The study of an economic world is a complex and unpredictable undertaking, involving people buying, selling, investing, bargaining and persuading. As a result of it being broad and complex, it is divided into many disciplines to make reason from information given by the economy.
To analyze this approach is vital to take into account the concept of capitalism, this is a system in which the main and the only objective is to profit. In capitalism the power and the decision making are based on the ones who own the factors of production, so it depends on what they need or what they want to make changes; changes that are going to bring benefits to