Microeconomics

B. Douglas Bernheim graduated with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard University, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in 1979. He entered graduate study at M.I.T. under a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and completed his Ph.D. three years later. He began his academic career at Stanford University and taught there from 1982 to 1987. He left Stanford in 1988 to assume an endowed chair in the Department of Finance at Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. In 1990 he moved to Princeton University, where he held an endowed chair in the Department of Economics and also served as the co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies. He returned to Stanford in 1994 and is now the Edward Ames Edmonds Professor of Economics. Professor Bernheim’s work has spanned a number of fields, including public economics, political economy, game theory, contract theory, behavioural economics, industrial organization, and financial economics. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and co-director of SIEPR’s Tax and Budget Policy Program. He is also a former director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics and co-editor of the American Economic Review. Professor Bernheim’s teaching has included principles of economics, intermediate microeconomics, public economics, microeconomic theory, industrial organization, behavioural economics, and insurance and risk management. Michael D. Whinston is the Robert E. and Emily H. King Professor of Business Institutions in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. He also holds appointments at Northwestern’s School of Law and its Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Whinston received his B.S. and M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from M.I.T. He taught at Harvard from 1984 to 1997 before moving to Northwestern. His research has covered a variety of topics in microeconomics, including game theory, the design of contracts and organizations, fi rm behaviour in oligopolistic markets, antitrust, and law and economics. He has also conducted empirical research on the airline and pharmaceutical industries, and served as a consultant—for private parties, the government, and the courts—in various antitrust cases. Whinston is a co-author of the leading graduate textbook in microeconomics, Microeconomic Theory (Oxford University Press, 1995), and is also the author of Lectures on Antitrust Economics (MIT Press, 2006). He and Bernheim have collaborated since 1983, and are excited about this opportunity to produce an innovative new microeconomics text for undergraduates.

Bernheim and Whinston: Microeconomics
Part I: Introduction


1.Preliminaries

2.Supply and Demand

3.Balancing Benefits and Costs




Part II: Individual Decision Making

IIA: Consumption Decisions

4.Principles and Preferences
5.Constraints, Choices, and Demand
6.From Demand to Welfare
IIB: Production Decisions

7.Technology and Production
8.Cost Minimization
9. Profit Maximization

IIC: Additional Topics

10. Decisions Involving Time
11. Decisions involving uncertainty
12. Decisions Involving Strategy (Game Theory)
13. Behavioral Economics
Part III: Markets

IIIA. Competitive Markets


14.Equilibrium and Efficiency

IIIB: Imperfectly Competitive Markets

17. Monopoly
18. Pricing
19. Oligopoly
20. Externalities and Public Goods
21. Information and Contracts