Essay1958
I, Pencil
Leonard Read
No single person knows how to make a pencil, which is the clearest available illustration of distributed coordination.
≈2,500 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Microeconomics
Individual agents, firms and markets — preferences, market structure, and the externalities that break the model.
13 topics · 15 curated works
Topics
- 01Foundations & Overviews2
- 02Supply & Demand1
- 03Consumer Theory
- 04Theory of the Firm
- 05Market Structures1
- 06Elasticity1
- 07Externalities1
- 08Public Goods1
- 09Information Asymmetry4
- 10Principal-Agent Problems1
- 11Price Discrimination1
- 12General Equilibrium1
- 13Welfare Economics1
Reading in Microeconomics
15A way in
Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
I, Pencil
Leonard Read · 1958
No single person knows how to make a pencil, which is the clearest available illustration of distributed coordination.
+2 more at this level
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Market for Lemons
George Akerlof · 1970
Asymmetric information can collapse a market entirely, even when mutually beneficial trades exist.
+2 more at this level
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
Principles of Economics
Alfred Marshall · 1890
Systematises supply and demand into the marginalist price theory still taught today, treating equilibrium price as where marginal utility to buyers…
+8 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Book2017
Principles of Microeconomics
OpenStax
A full open textbook covering how firms and prices behave under each of the four canonical market structures -- perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition and oligopoly -- building the marginal-cost/marginal-revenue toolkit used to tell them apart.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Series2023
MIT 14.01 Principles of Microeconomics
Jonathan Gruber (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Builds microeconomics from constrained optimisation, so that demand curves, firm behaviour and market failure all follow from the same maximisation problem rather than arriving as separate topics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Paper1970
The Market for Lemons
George Akerlof
Asymmetric information can collapse a market entirely, even when mutually beneficial trades exist.
13 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper1971
A Disneyland Dilemma: Two-Part Tariffs for a Mickey Mouse Monopoly
Walter Y. Oi
Shows that a monopolist facing customers with different demand intensities can extract more surplus with an entry fee plus a per-unit price than with either alone, using Disneyland's admission-plus-rides pricing as the running example.
17 pagesPaidIntermediate
Lecture2002
Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Once markets are modelled with the asymmetric information that actually exists between buyers and sellers, workers and firms, and borrowers and lenders, the competitive equilibrium of standard theory stops being either efficient or a reliable description of how those markets behave.
Nobel Prize lecturelink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Book1890
Principles of Economics
Alfred Marshall
Systematises supply and demand into the marginalist price theory still taught today, treating equilibrium price as where marginal utility to buyers meets marginal cost to sellers.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeAdvanced
Book1920
The Economics of Welfare
A. C. Pigou
Argues that private and social costs diverge whenever an action has side effects on bystanders, and that a tax equal to the external cost can restore the efficient outcome.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeAdvanced
Paper1954
Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy
Kenneth Arrow & Gérard Debreu
Proves, using fixed-point methods, that a set of prices exists at which every market in an economy of many goods and agents clears simultaneously.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeAdvanced
Paper1954
The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure
Paul A. Samuelson
Defines a public good by the property that one person's consumption of it does not reduce what is left for anyone else, and shows that no decentralised market mechanism can be relied on to supply it efficiently.
2 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeAdvanced
Paper1960
The Problem of Social Cost
Ronald Coase
Argues that when bargaining is costless, externalities settle at the efficient outcome regardless of who is assigned the legal right, so the real question is why transaction costs stop that bargaining.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeAdvanced
Paper1961
Capital-Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency
Kenneth J. Arrow, Hollis B. Chenery, Bagicha S. Minhas & Robert M. Solow
Proposes the constant elasticity of substitution production function after finding that Cobb-Douglas's assumption of a fixed unit elasticity of substitution between capital and labour does not fit cross-industry wage and productivity data.
24 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeAdvanced
In order written
1890 – 2023- 1890Principles of EconomicsAlfred Marshall
- 1920The Economics of WelfareA. C. Pigou
- 1954Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive EconomyKenneth Arrow & Gérard Debreu
- 1954The Pure Theory of Public ExpenditurePaul A. Samuelson
- 1958I, PencilLeonard Read
- 1960The Problem of Social CostRonald Coase
- 1961Capital-Labor Substitution and Economic EfficiencyKenneth J. Arrow, Hollis B. Chenery, Bagicha S. Minhas & Robert M. Solow
- 1970The Market for LemonsGeorge Akerlof
- 1971A Disneyland Dilemma: Two-Part Tariffs for a Mickey Mouse MonopolyWalter Y. Oi
- 1973Job Market SignalingMichael Spence
- 1976Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect InformationMichael Rothschild & Joseph E. Stiglitz
- 2002Information and the Change in the Paradigm in EconomicsJoseph E. Stiglitz
- 2016Pay for Performance and BeyondBengt Holmström
- 2017Principles of MicroeconomicsOpenStax
- 2023MIT 14.01 Principles of MicroeconomicsJonathan Gruber (MIT OpenCourseWare)