Postgraduate - UnitECC5900 - Microeconomics

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 3, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Postgraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Business and Economics
Organisational Unit	Department of Economics
Offered	Clayton First semester 2015 (Day) Clayton Second semester 2015 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Professor Klaus Abbink (First semester); Associate Professor Elias Khalil (Second semester)

Synopsis

The behaviour of the economy is the result of a host of decisions made each day by millions of people. Prices and markets play a crucial role in economic behaviour, creating a system in which actions of individuals, guided by self-interest and without any central co-ordination or planning, create wealth for society as a whole. How individual workers, households and firms make decisions, and how they interact with each other, is the subject of microeconomics.

Outcomes

The learning goals associated with this unit are to:

understand how markets work, and how prices work to allocate resources
understand the basic principles of how people make economic decisions, how they interact economically, and how the economy as a whole works
understand the role of public policy, and the constraints on its operation, when markets fail
understand how firms are organised and make decisions
have developed learning skills and begun to acquire the techniques of thinking like an economist
have sufficient grounding to attempt advanced studies in microeconomics in subsequent years.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 30%
Examination: 70%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. Independent study may include associated readings, assessment and preparation for scheduled activities. The unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Chief examiner(s)

Professor Klaus Abbink (First semester)
Associate Professor Elias Khalil (Second semester)

Off-campus attendance requirements

3 hours per week

Prohibitions

ECC2000, ETC2000, ECX9000