Principles of Microeconomics
- ISBN-10
- 1530711371
- ISBN-13
- 9781530711376
- Series
- Principles of Microeconomics
- Pages
- 384
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-03-23
- Authors
- Ian Irvine, Douglas Curtis
Description
Principles of Microeconomics focuses upon the material that students need to cover in a first introductory course. It is slightly more compact than the majority of principles books in the Canadian marketplace. Decades of teaching experience and textbook writing has led the authors to avoid the encyclopedic approach that characterizes the recent trends in textbooks.Consistent with this approach, there are no appendices or 'afterthought' chapters. No material is relegated elsewhere for a limited audience; the text makes choices on what issues and topics are important in an introductory course. This philosophy has resulted in a Micro book of just 15 chapters, of which Chapters 1 through 3 are common to both Micro and Macro, and a Macro book of 13 chapters.Examples are domestic and international in their subject matter and are of the modern era - consumers buy iPods, snowboards and jazz, not so much coffee and hamburgers. Globalization is a recurring theme.While this book avoids calculus, and uses equations sparingly, it still aims to be rigorous. In contrast to many books on the market, that simply insert diagrams and discuss concepts in a diagrammatic framework, our books almost invariably analyze the key issues in each chapter by introducing a numerical example or case study at the outset. Students are introduced immediately to the practice of taking a set of data, examining it numerically, plotting it, and again analyzing the material in that form. This process is not difficult, but it is rigorous, and stresses that economics is about data analysis as well as ideas and theories. The end-of-chapter problems also involve a considerable amount of numerical and graphical analysis. A small number of problems in each chapter involve solving simple linear equations (intersecting straight lines); but we provide a sufficient number of questions for the student to test his or her understanding of the material without working through that subset of questions.
