Microeconomics for Business and Marketing [antikvár]

Preface And now for something completely different. For many years I lived in the hope that someone would write a book which presented, at a level accessible to students of intermediate microeconomics, a guide to the key ideas of both mainstream neoclassical economics as well as to behavioural and institutional economics. Innovative texts did appear, such as Ricketts (1987) and Frank (1991) but, good though they were at covering what their authors set out to cover, they did not explore the full range of microeconomics that I planned to teach when I next had the chance. In 1991, that opportunity was presented to me when I took up the Chair in Economics at Lincoln University in New Zealand. I had no intention of allowing my coverage of microeconomics to be constrained by the existing supply of textbooks but it was quite clear from the outset that most of my class of over 250 students had no intention of learning by reading widely from a reading list: they wanted a set of lecture notes as their main reference tool, with something akin to a textbook as a back-up. It was also clear that most of the class had very poor analytical and essay-writing skills, and that they expected at all times to be told what the 'right' answers were. Clearer still was the impossibility of my doing any research if each week I might expect to have dozens of students knocking on my door expecting a private tutorial on 'how to do the essay'. I wanted to lead them towards being able to analyse practical business problems in a self-reliant way and be able to write up reports and argue cases with a competence that would reflect well on Lincoln University; and I wanted to train them honestly, in the sense of opening their eyes to the range of thinking that exists in microeconomics rather than ignoring non-mainstream contributions even though these might be perfectly accessible to the class. There was only one thing for it: I was going to have to write a textbook myself, a book in which I presented more than a single paradigm and in which I provided copious amounts of role-model material on strategies for tackling essay and case study problems. There was an interesting irony here: I would eventually be writing about vertical integration and market failure, but I was having to produce the text myself because the textbook market had failed to satisfy my needs. Three years later, as I completed the final draft, it was obvious why the market had hitherto failed in this way. It was not that there was an insufficient demand for this sort of book: on the contrary, even prior to the publication of the finished work, 'desktop publishing' versions of the text were being used by some like-minded economists teaching in other institutions, in Australia, the United Kingdom and Austria. Though I used the book as an intermediate microeconomics text, others have pointed out that it may also serve as a third-year undergraduate text to be read in parallel with a more technical text of the conventional kind, or on microeconomics courses for MBA students. Some might even want to use it in teaching students at the postgraduate level who have hitherto had an exposure only to neoclassical economics, while many lecturers should find it very useful for getting familiar with non-mainstream microeconomics and seeing how it may be applied to new kinds of business problems. This range of audiences is one of the reasons why the book is presented in a more scholarly manner than traditional texts, with an emphasis on original XI