This paper examines the question of how an instructor's attendance policy influences student performance in Principles of Microeconomics. This study asked students in several different microeconomics classes at a medium sized regional university what sort of attendance policy they were subject...

Intermediate microeconomics textbooks employ indifference curve analysis to explain the income and substitution effects of a change in the price of a good x on the demand for it, holding other variables constant. Further, they demonstrate how the shape and slope of the demand curve changes...

I present a classroom experiment designed to help students learn (1) decision-making using marginal analysis; (2) the prediction of the price; (3) the decentralized determination of a price by the market; (4) specialization; (5) the gains from trade; and (6) the ability of a competitive market to...

We provide 11 short exercises that can be used in a principles of microeconomics classroom which incorporate media clips from the Economics Media Library. The exercises have been used in both small and large classroom settings and take less than 15 minutes to complete. These teaching guides can...

It is now a commonplace to include a discussion of the Coase theorem in one's intermediate microeconomics textbook, generally in a chapter devoted to externalities or externalities and public goods. But this was not always the case. As the present paper demonstrates, it took nearly two decades...

This paper presents an in-class experiment used as a teaching tool in an introductory microeconomics class at the undergraduate college level. It is directed at a critical but challenging concept for principles students — constrained utility maximization and a methodology to intuit...

Classroom experiments as a teaching tool increase understanding and especially motivation. Traditionally, experiments have been run using pen-and-paper or in a computer lab. Pen-and-paper is time and resource consuming. Experiments in the lab require appropriate installations and impede the...

Classes in microeconomics typically use cubic cost functions because they can exhibit marginal costs that fall as output increases to some efficient level, and then rise thereafter. Cubic cost functions embody economies of scale, making it easy to illustrate that concept with quadratic average...

Here are fifteen computer-based exercises in microeconomics. The first seven exercises correspond to basic concepts from an introductory course on the subject: production possibilities, supply and demand, product-market structures, public goods. The other eight exercises apply some of these...

Computer simulators are proving to be indispensable education tools as they enable their users to readily apply theoretical knowledge and to automatically receive immediate feedback, which is invaluable both to learners and to their instructors. Yet at present, there is virtually no publically...