Study Guide: for Principles of Microeconomics, Fourth Edition Study Guide Edition

I don't mean to be repetive, but our daughter just started her Freshman year in college, and we had to get to Econ books for her. Amazon just happened to have them...at a very good price I might add! ; ) So we ordered them through Amazon. I put something similar on the text which goes with the study guide. (What a good kid, and she's being very frugal - looking for a "better price" than the competition! LOL)Our oldest just started college this fall (2009) Her Econ Prof. was so adamant about having this study guide, he had the kids send back perfectly good Econ texts for this one, along with the $92+ text with which it goes. (The texts they sent back were "perfectly good" I read through the others, and were sound, and a good tool for those new to Econ.) Yikes!The costs of these books can be astounding, but a better price is almost always found on Amazon, right! This book was a fraction of the original price. With college costing as much as it does we we're all for her purchasing slightly used books - as long as the study manuals have no writing in them!Our daughter must've gotten a different edition than the previous reviewer; as of yet there have been no problems, and no complaints from the other classes. These are the two the Prof insists upon. His insistance, combined with my own brief once-over, as well as our daughters' is what I based my rating upon. I'm sure you'd like more info, and I'm sorry not to be able to provide it, but I didn't have the text long enough before she left for school to give a really good going over.

The study guide was kind of useful, but it often asked pointless questions about details with which we were completely unconcerned in my Intro Microeconomics class. Also, it often gave the wrong answers for multiple choice questions, resulting in such inaccurate assertions as "The statement that firms in competitive markets are price takers means that average cost equals marginal cost at the minimum of average cost." It contradicted the book as well, defining the long run average cost curve as the straight line running along the bottom of the short-run curves when in actuality such a curve is the minimum average cost curve, and it bizarrely defined the real product wage as the marginal product divided by the product price. This last error wasn't exactly a typo, because it appeared twice. I can only imagine how many microeconomics students this study guide has misled and confused.