Most of us are challenged to cover more than 12 chapters in a term, so the 15 chapters in Microeconomics for Life allow choice in what to cover. And with a digital text, it is easy to arrange the chapters in the order you prefer to teach them.

If you teach a 1-term, combined micro/macro survey course, see Survey Course for suggestions on combining chapters from Microeconomics for Life and Macroeconomics for Life.

The table below highlights two approaches for teaching a 1-term microeconomic principles course.

Choosing 12 Chapters for Traditional Approaches or LT Approach

Choosing a Traditional Approach

As the table shows, the order of microeconomic chapters resembles most existing texts. A traditional approach focusing on discrete models would mostly follow the chapters in order, although the externality chapter (Chapter 13) can easily be moved up to follow Chapter 4 (Coordinating Smart Choices: Demand and Supply).

Topics like monopolistic competition, oligopoly, price discrimination — those are included in Chapters 9 (Pricing Power: Market Structure and Pricing), and 11 (Pricing for Profits in Imperfect Competition: Marginal Revenue and Marginal Cost). We use “imperfect competition” to consolidate those topics by treating market structure as a continuum from monopoly to perfect competition.

To reduce the number of chapters to 12, your options include:

• Omitting Chapter 15 (Are Sweatshops All Bad? Globalization, Trade, and Protectionism) because the simple comparative advantage model is also in Chapter 1. Besides the simple comparative advantage model, Chapter 15 includes the World Market model, which is a good application of the basic supply and demand model. Other chapter sections on protectionism and the economics of sweatshops can be skipped in a model-focused micro course.
• Omitting Chapter 12 (When Markets Fail: Natural Monopoly, Gaming, Competition, and Government) with topics like natural monopoly, game theory, competition policy.
• Omitting Ch 14 (What Are You Worth? Inputs, Incomes, and Inequality). This is often a chapter at the end of texts that instructors run out of time for. The core of the chapter consists of the three principles determining factor incomes — marginal productivity for labor, present value for capital, and economic rent for land and natural resources. There are also data-driven sections on income inequality, which can be skipped in a model-focused course.

 Choosing a Literacy-Targeted (LT) Approach

If you are interested in trying an LT approach in the course, here is what we do.

As the table shows, when teaching micro with an LT approach, we omit Chapter 7 (Getting the Most Bang per Buck: Utility behind Demand), Chapter 10 (What’s Perfect about Perfect Competition? Productivity, Costs, and Efficiency) and Chapter 15  (Are Sweatshops All Bad? Globalization, Trade, and Protectionism). That leaves 12 chapters to cover.

If those seen like unimaginable omissions, please read on.

You can omit Chapter 7 (Utility behind Demand) because Chapter 2 (Making Smart Choices: The Law of Demand)covers the basics of consumer choice — choose when marginal benefits are greater than marginal opportunity costs — and emphasizes the importance of willingness and ability to pay in determining demand. Chapter 2 also covers the roles of preferences, related products, income and expectations in determining demand. Chapter 7 reprises most of the same topics, but in the language of the utility-maximizing model. Chapter 7 also introduces a new section on behavioral economics that can be covered with Chapter 2.

You can omit Chapter 10 on perfect competition because Chapters 8 and 9 cover the main results of the perfect competition model.

Chapter 8 (Finding Producers’ Bottom Line: Profits and Costs behind Supply) distinguishes normal and economic profits, and shows how economic profits are competed away when entry is possible, leading to a long-run efficient outcome. It also describes how short-run diminishing marginal productivity increases marginal costs and shapes the ATC curve, and describes differences among economies of scale, constant returns to scale, and diseconomies of scale.

Chapter 9 (Pricing Power: Market Structure and Pricing) begins by describing the characteristics of market structure — pricing power, product substitutes, number of sellers, barriers to entry, elasticity of demand — using the extremes of monopoly and perfect competition. Businesses in all market structures share the profit-maximizing rule of equating marginal revenue and marginal cost. Characteristics of perfect competition include price taking, many sellers producing identical products, no barriers to entry, and perfectly elastic demand. Chapter 9 also describes what marginal revenue and marginal cost curves look like for price takers and price makers. All this is done without any use of cost curves beyond marginal cost curves. Chapter 10 (What’s Perfect about Perfect Competition? Productivity, Costs, and Efficiency) covers most of the same topics, but in the format of the profit-maximizing model with U-shaped average cost curves.

Expanded Teaching Choices

These 15 chapters support many approaches to teaching microeconomic principles — traditional, literacy-targeted, as well as combinations of approaches. As teachers, we all have individual preferences, and choice is a good thing! Regardless of your approach, you will have made a smart choice to have your students engage with, and learn from, Microeconomics for Life.