ISE Microeconomics and Behavior

Professor Heffetz received his B.A. in physics and philosophy from Tel Aviv University in 1999 and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2005. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, where he has taught since 2005. Bringing the real world into the classroom, Professor Heffetz has created a unique macroeconomics course that introduces basic concepts and tools from economic theory and applies them to current news and global events. His popular classes are taken by hundreds of students every year, on the Cornell Ithaca campus and, via live videoconferencing, in dozens of cities across the U.S., Canada, and beyond. Professor Heffetz s research studies the social and cultural aspects of economic behavior, focusing on the mechanisms that drive consumers choices and on the links between economic choices, individual well-being, and policymaking. He has published scholarly work on household consumption patterns, individual economic decision making, and survey methodology and measurement. He was a visiting researcher at the Bank of Israel during 2011, is currently a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and serves on the editorial board of Social Choice and Welfare.

Part 1: Introduction
1. Thinking Like an Economist
2. Supply and Demand
Appendix: How Do Taxes Affect Equilibrium Prices and Quantities?

Part 2: The Theory of Consumer Behavior
3. Rational Consumer Choice
Appendix: The Utility Function Approach to the Consumer Budgeting Problem
4. Individual and Market Demand
Appendix: Additional Topics in Demand Theory
Applications of Rational Choice and Demand Theories
6. The Economics of Information and Choice Under Uncertainty
Appendix: Search Theory and the Winner’s Curse
7. Departures from Standard Rational Choice Models with and without Regret)

Part 3: The Theory of the Firm and Market Structure
8. Production
Appendix: Mathematical Extensions of Production Theory
9. Costs
Appendix: Mathematical Extensions of the Theory of Costs
10. Perfect Competition
11. Monopoly
12. A Game-Theoretic Approach to Strategic Behavior
13. Oligopoly and Monopolistic Competition

Part 4: Factor Markets
14. Labor
Appendix: The Economics of Workplace Safety
15. Capital
Appendix: A More Detailed Look at Exhaustible Resource Allocation

Part 5: General Equilibrium and Welfare
16. Externalities, Property Rights, and the Coase Theorem
General Equilibrium and Market Efficiency
18. Government
Web Chapter: Explaining Tastes: The Importance of Altruism and Other Nonegoistic Behavior