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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. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the national economy as a whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.
Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. Along with John Hicks, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972.
Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society. This evaluation is typically done at the economy-wide level, and attempts to assess the distribution of resources and opportunities among members of society.
In economics, comparative statics is the comparison of two different economic outcomes, before and after a change in some underlying exogenous parameter.
In welfare economics, a social planner is a hypothetical decision-maker who attempts to maximize some notion of social welfare. The planner is a fictional entity who chooses allocations for every agent in the economy—for example, levels of consumption and leisure—that maximize a social welfare function subject to certain constraints. This so-called planner's problem is a mathematical constrained optimization problem. Solving the planner's problem for all possible Pareto weights yields all Pareto efficient allocations.
In microeconomics, the expenditure minimization problem is the dual of the utility maximization problem: "how much money do I need to reach a certain level of happiness?". This question comes in two parts. Given a consumer's utility function, prices, and a utility target,
In economics, a budget set, or the opportunity set facing a consumer, is the set of all possible consumption bundles that the consumer can afford taking as given the prices of commodities available to the consumer and the consumer's income. Let the number of commodities available to the consumer in an economy be finite and equal to . Thus, for commodity amounts , also known as consumption plans which should not exceed the income, with associated prices and consumer income , the budget set is defined as
In economics, an agent's preferences are said to be weakly monotonic if, given a consumption bundle , the agent prefers all consumption bundles that have more of all goods. That is, implies . An agent's preferences are said to be strongly monotonic if, given a consumption bundle , the agent prefers all consumption bundles that have more of at least one good, and not less in any other good. That is, and imply .
In microeconomic theory, the marginal rate of technical substitution (MRTS)—or technical rate of substitution (TRS)—is the amount by which the quantity of one input has to be reduced when one extra unit of another input is used, so that output remains constant.
A regular economy is an economy characterized by an excess demand function which has the property that its slope at any equilibrium price vector is non-zero. In other words, if we graph the excess demand function against prices, then the excess demand function "cuts" the x-axis assuring that each equilibrium is locally unique. Local uniqueness in turn permits the use of comparative statics - an analysis of how the economy responds to external shocks - as long as these shocks are not too large.
The law of supply is a fundamental principle of economic theory which states that, keeping other factors constant, an increase in sales price results in an increase in quantity supplied. In other words, there is a direct relationship between price and quantity: quantities respond in the same direction as price changes. This means that producers and manufacturers are willing to offer more of a product for sale on the market at higher prices, as increasing production is a way of increasing profits.
In economics, partial equilibrium is a condition of economic equilibrium which analyzes only a single market, ceteris paribus except for the one change at a time being analyzed. In general equilibrium analysis, on the other hand, the prices and quantities of all markets in the economy are considered simultaneously, including feedback effects from one to another, though the assumption of ceteris paribus is maintained with respect to such things as constancy of tastes and technology.
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 an exchange economy 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 the excess demand function does not take a well-behaved form even if each agent has a well-behaved utility function. Market processes will not necessarily reach a unique and stable equilibrium point.
In economics exponential discounting is a specific form of the discount function, used in the analysis of choice over time. Formally, exponential discounting occurs when total utility is given by
Andreu Mas-Colell is an economist, an expert in microeconomics and a prominent mathematical economist. He is the founder of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and a professor in the department of economics at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. He has also served several times in the cabinet of the Catalan government. Summarizing his and others' research in general equilibrium theory, his monograph gave a thorough exposition of research using differential topology. His textbook Microeconomic Theory, co-authored with Michael Whinston and Jerry Green, is the most used graduate microeconomics textbook in the world.
In economics, non-convexity refers to violations of the convexity assumptions of elementary economics. Basic economics textbooks concentrate on consumers with convex preferences and convex budget sets and on producers with convex production sets; for convex models, the predicted economic behavior is well understood. When convexity assumptions are violated, then many of the good properties of competitive markets need not hold: Thus, non-convexity is associated with market failures, where supply and demand differ or where market equilibria can be inefficient. Non-convex economies are studied with nonsmooth analysis, which is a generalization of convex analysis.
Convexity is a geometric property with a variety of applications in economics. Informally, an economic phenomenon is convex when "intermediates are better than extremes". For example, an economic agent with convex preferences prefers combinations of goods over having a lot of any one sort of good; this represents a kind of diminishing marginal utility of having more of the same good.
In expected utility theory, a lottery is a discrete distribution of probability on a set of states of nature. The elements of a lottery correspond to the probabilities that each of the states of nature will occur, e.g.. Much of the theoretical analysis of choice under uncertainty involves characterizing the available choices in terms of lotteries.
Michael D. Whinston is an American economist and currently the Sloan Fellows Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously he was the Robert E. and Emily H. King Professor at Northwestern University and is also a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Econometric Society. Together with Andreu Mas-Colell and Jerry R. Green he authored the standard US graduate level microeconomics textbook: Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston and Jerry R. Green (1995) Microeconomic Theory, Oxford University Press
Jerry Richard Green is the John Leverett Professor in the University and the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He is known for his research in economic theory, as well as writing the most commonly used microeconomic theory for graduate school with Andreu Mas-Colell and Michael Whinston, Microeconomic Theory.