C3_FRAMEWORK_SOCIAL_STUDIESAPhigh school
AP Microeconomics
Zoom into the decisions of individual consumers, firms, and markets. You'll master supply and demand, cost curves, the four market structures, factor markets, and market failure -- everything the College Board AP Microeconomics exam tests, practiced through the graphs and reasoning the exam rewards.
6units
13topics
195questions
~5hours
Course Units
Learning objectives
- Define scarcity and explain its implications for economic decision-making
- Calculate and interpret opportunity cost using production possibilities curves
- Use production possibilities curves to illustrate tradeoffs, efficiency, and economic growth
- Distinguish between absolute and comparative advantage and explain gains from trade
- Apply marginal analysis to decision-making using the MB = MC rule
Topics in this unit
Learning objectives
- Explain the laws of supply and demand and identify their non-price determinants (shifters)
- Determine equilibrium price and quantity and predict how shifts change equilibrium
- Calculate and interpret price elasticity of demand and supply and explain what drives elasticity
- Calculate consumer surplus, producer surplus, and total surplus from a graph
- Analyze the effects of price ceilings, price floors, taxes, and subsidies on market outcomes and deadweight loss
Topics in this unit
Learning objectives
- Explain the law of diminishing marginal returns and its effect on short-run production costs
- Calculate and graph MC, ATC, AVC, and AFC and explain their relationships
- Determine profit-maximizing output using the MR = MC rule and identify profit or loss on a graph
- Analyze short-run shutdown decisions by comparing price to AVC
- Explain long-run equilibrium in perfect competition and why economic profit equals zero
- Distinguish between productive efficiency (P = min ATC) and allocative efficiency (P = MC)
Topics in this unit
Learning objectives
- Analyze pricing and output decisions for a single-price monopoly and identify deadweight loss
- Explain how price discrimination affects monopoly profit, consumer surplus, and efficiency
- Compare monopolistic competition to perfect competition in both the short run and long run
- Analyze oligopoly behavior using game theory, the prisoner's dilemma, and Nash equilibrium
- Explain how barriers to entry sustain market power across different market structures
- Compare efficiency outcomes (productive, allocative) across all four market structures
Topics in this unit
Learning objectives
- Explain why demand for factors of production is derived demand
- Calculate marginal revenue product (MRP) and use it to determine the profit-maximizing quantity of labor
- Apply the MRP = MRC rule for factor hiring decisions in competitive and imperfectly competitive output markets
- Analyze wage and employment determination in competitive and monopsony labor markets
- Evaluate the effects of minimum wage and labor unions on employment and wages in different market structures
Topics in this unit
Learning objectives
- Identify and analyze positive and negative externalities using MSC and MSB curves
- Explain how Pigouvian taxes and subsidies can correct externality inefficiencies and move output to the socially optimal level
- Describe the characteristics of public goods and the free-rider problem
- Analyze the tragedy of the commons for common-pool resources
- Explain the Coase theorem and the conditions under which private bargaining resolves externalities
- Interpret the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient as measures of income inequality
- Evaluate the tradeoffs of government intervention including regulatory capture and government failure
Topics in this unit