Best Free MOOCs In Business For August

Microeconomics: When Markets Fail

School: University of Pennsylvania

Platform: Coursera

Registration Link: REGISTER HERE

Start Date: August 1, 2016

Workload: Not specified

Instructor: Rebecca Stein

Credentials: Stein is a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, where she teaches Introductory Microeconomics and Introductory Macroeconomics (among other courses). Armed with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Stein has taught at Penn for nearly two decades, collecting several teaching awards along the way. Her most recent research has been published by the Journal of Economic Education and the Medical Care Research and Review.

Graded: Students must successfully complete all graded assignments to pass the course.

Description: Markets are often celebrated as the solution, a lean-and-mean antidote to bloated bureaucracy. In theory, markets are supposed to reward the innovative and the hard-working, with fairness doled out through competition. However, the marketplace isn’t a perfect system. Sometimes organizations overproduce or people consume too much. At the same time, monopolies can emerge, wielding control over pricing and distribution to stifle competition. Even more, the system can create legions of winners and losers, which ultimately drives poverty and inequality.

In this course, Stein looks into how such “imperfections” creep into the market, along with covering tools, such as regulation, taxation, and government intervention, that can be used to bring back a sense of equilibrium.

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