Principles of Microeconomics

14.01SC is the OpenCourseWare Scholar edition of MIT's introductory microeconomics course, based on Jonathan Gruber's fall 2011 lectures and arranged for independent study. The course introduces microeconomic concepts and analysis, supply and demand, theories of the firm and individual behaviour, competition and monopoly, and welfare economics, and it uses these tools to look at problems in current economic policy. The material runs through six units: supply and demand, including elasticity; consumer theory, from preferences and budget constraints to deriving demand curves and applying the theory to labour; producer theory, covering productivity, costs and competition; welfare economics; monopoly and oligopoly; and a final unit on topics in intermediate microeconomics. Each unit pairs a complete set of lecture videos with reading assignments from a choice of two textbooks, one of them a free online edition, and multiple-choice quizzes to check understanding.

Problem sets with solutions, two midterms, a final exam and supplemental exam materials are provided. Everything is free to view and download under OpenCourseWare's Creative Commons licence, no account is needed and no certificate is issued. MITx Online offers a graded version of the same subject, 14.100x, with an optional paid certificate.