Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms.
Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are driven by the supply and demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production. This approach has often been justified by appealing to rational choice theory, a theory that has come under considerable question in recent years.
In economics, specifically general equilibrium theory, a perfect market, also known as an atomistic market, is defined by several idealizing conditions, collectively called perfect competition, or atomistic competition. In theoretical models where conditions of perfect competition hold, it has been demonstrated that a market will reach an equilibrium in which the quantity supplied for every product or service, including labor, equals the quantity demanded at the current price. This equilibrium would be a Pareto optimum.
In microeconomics, supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a market. It postulates that, holding all else equal, in a competitive market, the unit price for a particular good, or other traded item such as labor or liquid financial assets, will vary until it settles at a point where the quantity demanded will equal the quantity supplied, resulting in an economic equilibrium for price and quantity transacted. It forms the theoretical basis of modern economics.
In economics, general equilibrium theory attempts to explain the behavior of supply, demand, and prices in a whole economy with several or many interacting markets, by seeking to prove that the interaction of demand and supply will result in an overall general equilibrium. General equilibrium theory contrasts to the theory of partial equilibrium, which only analyzes single markets. In general equilibrium, constant influences are considered to be noneconomic, therefore, resulting beyond the natural scope of economic analysis.
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
Welfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to evaluate well-being (welfare) at the aggregate (economy-wide) level.
Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist and mathematician. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Mechanism design is a field in economics and game theory that takes an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory. It has broad applications, from economics and politics in such fields as market design, auction theory and social choice theory to networked-systems.
Erik Lindahl was a Swedish economist. He was professor of economics at Uppsala University 1942–58 and in 1956–59 he was the President of the International Economic Association. He was an also an advisor to the Swedish government and the central bank, and in 1943 was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Lindahl posed the question of financing public goods in accordance with individual benefits. The quantity of the public good satisfies the requirement that the aggregate marginal benefit equals the marginal cost of providing the good.
The property of local nonsatiation of consumer preferences states that for any bundle of goods there is always another bundle of goods arbitrarily close that is preferred to it.
The Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem is an important result in general equilibrium economics, proved by Gérard Debreu, Rolf Mantel, and Hugo F. Sonnenschein in the 1970s. It states that the excess demand curve for a market populated with utility-maximizing rational agents can take the shape of any function that is continuous, has homogeneity degree zero, and is in accordance with Walras's law. This implies that market processes will not necessarily reach a unique and stable equilibrium point.
Value and Capital is a book by the British economist John Richard Hicks, published in 1939. It is considered a classic exposition of microeconomic theory. Central results include:
Competitive equilibrium is a concept of economic equilibrium introduced by Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu in 1951 appropriate for the analysis of commodity markets with flexible prices and many traders, and serving as the benchmark of efficiency in economic analysis. It relies crucially on the assumption of a competitive environment where each trader decides upon a quantity that is so small compared to the total quantity traded in the market that their individual transactions have no influence on the prices. Competitive markets are an ideal standard by which other market structures are evaluated.
Cooperative bargaining is a process in which two people decide how to share a surplus that they can jointly generate. In many cases, the surplus created by the two players can be shared in many ways, forcing the players to negotiate which division of payoffs to choose. Such surplus-sharing problems are faced by management and labor in the division of a firm's profit, by trade partners in the specification of the terms of trade, and more.
Frank Horace Hahn FBA was a British economist whose work focused on general equilibrium theory, monetary theory, Keynesian economics and monetarism. A famous problem of economic theory, the conditions under which money can have a positive value in a general equilibrium, is called "Hahn's problem" after him.
In economics, especially in consumer theory, a Leontief utility function is a function of the form:
In algorithmic game theory, a succinct game or a succinctly representable game is a game which may be represented in a size much smaller than its normal form representation. Without placing constraints on player utilities, describing a game of players, each facing strategies, requires listing utility values. Even trivial algorithms are capable of finding a Nash equilibrium in a time polynomial in the length of such a large input. A succinct game is of polynomial type if in a game represented by a string of length n the number of players, as well as the number of strategies of each player, is bounded by a polynomial in n.
Oliver E. Williamson hypothesised (1964) that profit maximization would not be the objective of the managers of a joint stock organisation. This theory, like other managerial theories of the firm, assumes that utility maximisation is a manager’s sole objective. However it is only in a corporate form of business organisation that a self-interest seeking manager maximise his/her own utility, since there exists a separation of ownership and control. The managers can use their ‘discretion’ to frame and execute policies which would maximise their own utilities rather than maximising the shareholders’ utilities. This is essentially the principal–agent problem. This could however threaten their job security, if a minimum level of profit is not attained by the firm to distribute among the shareholders.
Market equilibrium computation is a computational problem in the intersection of economics and computer science. The input to this problem is a market, consisting of a set of resources and a set of agents. There are various kinds of markets, such as Fisher market and Arrow–Debreu market, with divisible or indivisible resources. The required output is a competitive equilibrium, consisting of a price-vector, and an allocation, such that each agent gets the best bundle possible given the budget, and the market clears.
