Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: describe fundamental economic theories, models, and concepts like economic scarcity and resource allocation; understand how price elasticity and income elasticity impact demand, and survey the forms of government intervention used to influence supply; recognize the significance of consumer choice in economics, and examine theories explaining consumer preference and decision making; assess the impact of budget lines, normal and superior goods, the rate of transformation, and other factors on supply and demand; consider how an assessment of fixed, variable, and total costs is used to make short-run production decisions; differentiate these costs from those associated with long-run production; identify conditions for perfect market competition, as well as the conditions of monopolies and oligopolies; discover how these market structures affect producers and consumers, and pinpoint characteristics of a command system; survey the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world's major economic powers; learn how game theory and the Nash equilibrium relate to economics; discuss the roles of producers and consumers in marketplaces designed to exchange labor, capital, and natural resources; understand the methods for measuring the labor market; examine barriers to trade, and consider their impact on demand; and describe U.S. tax structure, investigate the effects of value-added, progressive, and flat tax types; study rulings on key anti-trust legislation; and assess the effect of anti-trust legislation and government deregulation and regulation on the economy.