This is the first of a two-course sequence in the foundations of microeconomics that develops students’ understanding about a broad range of problems related to the operation of markets, social policy, and business. The first course covers the following topics: opportunity cost; marginal value; marginal cost; the production possibility frontier; indifference curves; the determination of market supply and demand; how market prices convey information about costs and benefits of goods and services procured in the market; elasticity of demand; income and substitution effects; the efficiency of competitive equilibrium consumer and producer surplus; externalities; public goods; the Coase Theorem; imperfect and asymmetric information; expected utility; risk aversion; and signaling.