Economics Today: The Micro View

Prices, wages, taxes, and the choices businesses make are part of everyday life. Economics Today: The Micro View introduces the reasoning behind those decisions, showing how people and firms respond to limited resources, incentives, and changing conditions.

Roger LeRoy Miller begins with the foundations of economic thinking and builds toward the ways markets work—and what happens when they do not. Across 18 chapters, the text moves from scarcity and supply and demand to competition, public policy, labor, the environment, and international trade.

Start with choices and trade-offs

The opening chapters establish the core questions: what gets produced, how it is produced, and who receives it? Readers explore scarcity, incentives, self-interest, and the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics. These ideas provide a framework for examining decisions rather than treating economic outcomes as isolated facts.

See how markets respond

Demand, supply, elasticity, and consumer choice form the toolkit for understanding how buyers and sellers interact. The book then turns to firms—their costs and output—and compares market structures including perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Together, these topics help explain how different conditions shape prices, production, and strategic behavior.

Connect economic ideas to public decisions

Public spending, taxation, regulation, and antitrust policy broaden the discussion beyond individual markets. Further chapters consider labor demand and supply, outsourcing, income and poverty, health care, and environmental economics. The final treatment of comparative advantage and the open economy places trade in a wider economic context.

A structured introduction to microeconomics

With its progression from basic concepts to firms, policy, and broader economic issues, this edition offers a clear route through introductory microeconomics. It is particularly relevant to students studying the subject and to readers who want a grounded way to think about how everyday choices and public policies interact.