Syllabus of Economics

The Wikiversity School of Economics Syllabus project

This learning project within the  Wikiversity School of Economics has the long term aim of establishing an online syllabus for a university degree in economics. To begin this task, this page aims to provide a syllabus for a first year or principles level course in microeconomics "Introductory Microeconomics".

This syllabus will serve as a test case for a model of an online syllabus that links topic modules to Wikipedia entries and other learning materials available online and that provides teachers and students with an organized test bank of questions and answers for use in formative and summative forms of assessment.

(If this initial test case is successful, then this page will become a directory to the whole economics curriculum and map out the relationship between the syllabus of each course. If this happens then the Introductory Microeconomics syllabus here will be moved to its own page. If you are interested in creating a syllabus for another course right now, e.g. Introductory Macroeconomics, then you could start simply by adding a table to the bottom of this page.)

## Introductory Microeconomics

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This is a syllabus for an introductory course at the level of first year university or a principles of microeconomics course. This syllabus is based on the common elements of the introductory microeconomics courses taught at many universities. The idea is that this syllabus will serve as the basis for creating a test bank of questions and answers that can be used to test a student's knowledge of introductory microeconomics. First, these questions and answers will be made available online in a text format. Second, these questions and answers will be converted into an interactive form using the  Wikiversity quiz extension.

This syllabus is structured as a number of modules consisting of a list of topics students will learn within that module. These lists will then serve as a guide for constructing sets of questions and answers that can be used by a student to test their knowledge of introductory microeconomics. These lists will describe the topics covered by the related sets of questions and answers and links will be provided from the syllabus to these sets of questions and answers. Initially, questions and answers will be formulated to serve the role of summative assessment - students will be able to test themselves and demonstrate their level of knowledge to others. Later, questions will be constructed using the Wikiversity quiz extension that also act as formative assessment and serve as interactive learning materials in and of themselves. Links are also provided from the syllabus to other pages where the relevant learning materials and questions and answers can be listed more neatly.

## How you could help

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If you would like to help with this learning project, you might like to enter links to relevant Wikipedia entries or other useful learning materials into the table below. Alternatively, you could help by adding questions and answers (or by helping verify existing questions and answers) to the test bank of questions and answers for each module in the syllabus.

If you'd like to help by contributing questions and answers but you're not sure how to put together original questions and answers, please visit this page for some guidance: Authoring Questions and Answers

If you need help writing mathematical formulae please read  Help:Formula.

## How to use these pages

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Look down the lists of topics in the topic modules and follow the links to relevant Wikipedia entries and other learning materials.

Until questions and answers are translated into an interactive form using the Wikiversity quiz extension, the best way to use the Q & A pages for study might be to copy the questions into Word and delete the answers so you can try to answer questions as a pratice exam before looking up the answers. If you want a copy of any of the pages on Wikiversity as they appear on the screen you can convert them into a pdf using the link "Download as PDF" found using the "print/export" link at the left-hand side of every page.

If you are a student currently studying for an introductory microeconomics course, please consider contributing questions and answers to these pages as part of your revision. Sometimes the best way to learn is to teach! Try working with a study-partner to write a few questions each to test each others' knowledge and contribute these questions to the test bank for others to use. (You never know, if you write good questions, your tutorer or lecturer might end up using them on your exam!)

## Introductory Microeconomics syllabus

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Topic module | Links to Wikipedia entries and learning materials | Links to exam questions and answers

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Introduction to economics

* The place of economics in the social sciences
* The subject matter of economics
* The role of mathematics in economics
* The allocation of scarce resources
* The optimization principle
* The role of economic models
* The use of experiments to test economic theories
* Decision theory and uncertainty
* The use of graphs in economics
* Examples of economic questions

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | Introduction - Q & A
Scarcity and economic interactions

* The decisions of consumers and producers
* Trade
* Ricardian rent and bargaining power
* Production possibilities
* Increasing opportunity costs
* The production possibilities frontier
* The features of a market economy and the price system

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | Scarcity and economic interactions - Q & A
The supply and demand model

* Demand
* The demand schedule and demand curve
* The price elasticity of demand
* Shifts in the demand curve
* Movements along the demand curve

* Supply
* The supply schedule and supply curve
* The price elasticity of supply
* Shifts in the supply curve
* Movements along the supply curve

* Market equilibrium
* Markets and government policy
* Price ceilings and price floors
* Shortages and surpluses

* Price as a measure of the scarcity of resources
* The assumptions of market prices as a measure of efficiency
* Property rights regimes, externalities, and public goods

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | The supply and demand model - Q & A
The behaviour of consumers

* Utility
* Consumer preferences
* Inferior goods and superior goods
* Marginal utility
* The budget constraint
* Utility maximization
* Price and willingness-to-pay
* Consumer surplus
* The budget line and the indifference curve
* The consumption possibilities set

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | The behaviour of consumers - Q & A
The behaviour of firms

* Firms as price takers in competitive markets
* Profit, total revenue, and production costs
* The production function
* Profit maximization
* Cost minimization
* Deriving the supply curve
* The market supply curve
* Producer surplus

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | The behaviour of firms - Q & A
Market institutions

* Planned economies, market economies, and mixed economies
* The double auction market
* Market efficiency - Pareto efficiency

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | Market institutions - Q & A
Markets and public policy

* Public goods and common pool resources
* The Coase theorem
* The tax system

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | Market and public policy - Q & A
Introduction to industrial organization

* Monopoly, Monopsony
* Oligopoly, Oligopsony
* Cournot, Stackelberg and Bertrand oligopoly
* Monopolistic competition
* Game Theory

|  Monopoly - Wikipedia

Monopsony - Wikipedia

| Introduction to industrial organization - Q & A
Introduction to labour economics

* The factors of production
* Markets for the factors of production

|  Wikipedia entries and other learning materials | Introduction to labour economics - Q & A