Microeconomics: A Journey Through Life’s Decisions

　　Publisher: Financial Times Press
　　Copyright: 2009
　　Format: Paper; 744 pp
　　ISBN-10: 0273718932
　　ISBN-13: 9780273718932

　　Deciding what to have for breakfast, to take the bus or the car and whether to go out on a date are every day decisions, but every decision you make is a choice, often with a wider reaching impact affecting your own life and the lives of others. In other words, you are putting microeconomics into practice.

　　If one of today’s decisions is whether to read a microeconomics text, surely microeconomic theory should have something to say about life’s decisions?

　　While 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. It analyses topics not traditionally associated with microeconomics, such as age, sex, relationships, families, education, politics, terrorism, racism and death.

　　John Cullis, University of Bath
　　Philip Jones, University of Bath

　　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.

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’?)