Examining Scarcity and

Opportunity Cost

Cornell Course

Regardless of your specific area of work, as a manager, it will be imperative for you to understand the incentives that people face and how they are likely to respond when constraints change. A solid foundation of microeconomics will give you a competitive advantage. It will help you answer critical management questions such as: Should we expand our capacity? Should we add more staff? How can you figure those things out?

In this course, you will begin with a cornerstone of microeconomics: opportunity cost. You will examine its definition as well as applications, and explore the hidden cost fallacy, the fixed cost fallacy, and the cost-benefit principle. A good understanding of opportunity cost will help you understand how these principles relate to changes in human behavior and drive decisions. You will examine key concepts of supply and demand and the ways in which they affect business decisions. You will also complete a project in which you apply these concepts to practical questions facing your workplace. You will examine the profit maximizing output rule for producers, define the first law of supply, examine the price elasticity of supply, and define the supply ceteris paribus conditions. You will define the consumer surplus maximizing rule for demanders, the first law of demand, the price elasticity of demand, and the demand ceteris paribus conditions. This course will set the foundation for your microeconomics studies.