Upon successful completion of the course the student will be able to:

• Understand the key issues in the economic analysis of the behavior of producers and consumers, using skills and tools that have accumulated during secondary education, as well as from views emerging from modern developments at the cutting edge of economic science.
• Understand the importance of scarcity in every aspect of economic life.
• Understand the difference between perfectly competitive and non-competitive markets.
• Be able to analyze different types of market (monopoly, oligopoly and competitive market).
• Analyze the effects of changes in demand and supply on prices and quantities of goods and services.
• Solve problems of minimizing production costs.
• Analyze the behavior of producers in a competitive market in the short and long run.
• Solve problems relating to the calculation of the surplus of the consumer and the producer.

• Introductory issues
• Demand and supply of goods and services
• Market equilibrium
• Definition and calculation of elasticity
• Market and state intervention – price control
• Theory of production and cost
• Theory of the firm and perfect competition
• Monopoly
• Monopolistic competition
• Oligopoly

Lectures (4 hours per week) and Tutorials (2 hours per week)

The assessment is based on student’s performance in the written final examination (80%) and on a mid-term examination during the semester (20%). The overall course grade is the sum of a) the final exam grade plus b) 20 percent of the mid-term exam grade.**

Written examinations deal with issues of understanding basic concepts, comparative evaluation of competitive theories and solving numerical problems related to the content of the course. Exam papers are of a multiple-choice format and students are asked to choose the correct answer (40 questions) from a list of 5 alternative answers (per question). The evaluation criteria are described in the Course Syllabus, which is posted on the platform eclass.upatras.gr.

** The above student evaluation method is a pilot one and will be re-examined at the end of academic year 2018-2019

Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) (e.g. power point) in teaching. The lectures for each chapter are uploaded on the e-class platform in the form of ppt files, which the enrolled students can freely download.