Università Roma Tre

Part 1: Consumer and production theory
1.1 Consumer theory: Classical demand theory (budget constraint, preferences, utility, consumption demand, indirect utility, expenditure function, welfare evaluation, equivalent and compensating variation, axioms of revealed preferences).
1.2 Production theory: Production sets. Profit maximization and cost minimization. The geometry of costs.

Part 2: Choice under uncertainty
2.1 Theory: Lotteries. Preferences over lotteries. Expected Utility Theory (EUT). Money lotteries and risk aversion. Comparison of payoff distributions in terms of returns and risk. Subjective probabilities. Some criticisms to EUT.
2.2 Applications: insurance and portfolio choice.

Part 3: Aggregation
3.1 Demand aggregation.
3.2 Supply aggregation.
3.3 On the existence of a "representative agent".

Part 4: General competitive equilibrium and its welfare properties
4.1 Simple economies: the Edgworth box, 1 producer \& 1 consumer economy, 2X2 economy.
4.2 Pareto optimality and social welfare optima: feasibility, Pareto optimal problem, welfare function, Pareto frontier.

Part 5: Possible additional topics
5.1 The positive theory of equilibrium Existence, uniqueness.
5.2 Competitive equilibrium under uncertainty: Markets for contingent commodities. Arrow-Debreu equilibrium. Markets for assets and insurance policies. Back to welfare properties of competitive equilibria. Sequential trade and incomplete markets.
5.3 Basic principles of financial economics: The fundamental theorem of asset pricing. Mean-variance analysis.

A. Mas-Colell, M.D. Whinston and J.R. Green, Microeconomic Theory, Oxford University Press, 1995
H. Varian, Microeconomic Analysis, WW Norton and co. New York, III edition.