University of Western Ontario (UWO )

These lecture notes from Chapter 16 of Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition) examine the economic challenges associated with public goods and common resources. The notes distinguish between private goods, public goods, common resources, and club goods based on rivalry and excludability. They explain how the **free-rider problem** leads to underproduction of public goods and how the **tragedy of the commons** results in overuse of shared resources. Graphs illustrate inef...

These lecture notes from Chapter 15 of Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition) explore how externalities—costs or benefits affecting third parties—lead to market failure. Negative externalities like pollution result in overproduction, while positive externalities like vaccinations cause underproduction. Graphs illustrate the gaps between private and social costs or benefits, highlighting resulting deadweight losses. The notes explain corrective tools such as Pigovian ...

These lecture notes from Chapter 14 of *Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition)* explore oligopoly, a market structure characterized by few dominant firms and strategic interdependence. The notes explain how game theory, including payoff matrices and the prisoner’s dilemma, helps predict firm behavior regarding price, output, advertising, and R&D. The kinked demand curve model illustrates price rigidity in oligopolies. Real-world examples from airlines, telecoms, and su...

These lecture notes from Chapter 13 of *Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition)* explore monopolistic competition, a common market structure characterized by many firms offering differentiated products. The notes explain how firms set prices and output in the short run—earning profits or losses—and how long-run entry erodes economic profit. Graphs illustrate equilibrium conditions and inefficiencies such as excess capacity. The chapter also explains why firms spend he...

These lecture notes from Chapter 12 of *Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition)* explore the nature and behavior of monopolies. They explain how monopolies arise through barriers to entry and how a single-price monopolist determines output where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. The notes compare monopoly outcomes to perfect competition, highlighting reduced output, higher prices, and deadweight loss. Price discrimination is examined as a strategy to increase profit ...

These lecture notes from Chapter 11 of *Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition)* explore the characteristics and dynamics of perfect competition. The notes explain how firms act as price takers, make output decisions by equating marginal cost and marginal revenue, and earn profits or incur losses in the short run. In the long run, entry and exit drive the market to zero economic profit and productive efficiency. Technological advancements lower costs and shift supply. Per...

These lecture notes from Chapter 10 of *Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition)* explain how firms make production decisions by analyzing costs in the short run and long run. The notes distinguish between accounting and economic profit, define total, marginal, and average product, and derive short-run cost curves like marginal cost and average total cost. They also introduce the long-run average cost curve, explaining how firms experience economies and diseconomies of sca...

These lecture notes from Chapter 9 of Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition) explore how consumers make optimal choices given their income, preferences, and prices. The budget line illustrates consumption possibilities, while indifference curves map consumer preferences. The concept of diminishing marginal rate of substitution explains why indifference curves are convex. The notes detail how consumers reach utility-maximizing choices where the budget line is tangent to a...

These lecture notes from Chapter 8 of *Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition)* explore how consumers make choices using the concept of utility. The notes explain total and marginal utility, the law of diminishing marginal utility, and how consumers maximize satisfaction within budget constraints using the equi-marginal principle. The paradox of value—why water costs less than diamonds—is resolved by focusing on marginal rather than total utility. The lecture also int...

These lecture notes from Chapter 7 of *Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment (11th Edition)* explore the mechanics and impacts of international trade. The notes explain how trade allows countries to specialize based on comparative advantage, increasing overall efficiency and consumer choice. They analyze the gains from trade and identify both winners and losers in domestic markets. Key trade barriers such as tariffs, quotas, and non-tariff regulations are examined for their economic e...