A league of their own

These books cover roughly the same standard undergraduate microeconomic analysis at a similar level of technical difficulty. Each of them is accompanied by copious additional resources on the internet. All are well-established texts that have endured many editions. McGraw-Hill has seen fit to "Europeanise" the text by Michael Katz and Harvey Rosen by bringing in Wyn Morgan, who consequently gets the lead author credit, whereas the other two books are unvarnished US texts offered to the European audience.

Given that economics is a universal body of doctrine, the only issue at stake is the injection of non-American examples. Morgan et al's work on this facet cannot be gauged from a brief glance at the book, as the contents do not separately identify the examples used. In truth, Microeconomics does not contain that many examples. If we take chapters 11 to 14 as a specimen, it is not immediately obvious how much European "spin"

has gone into this version, as the terminology tends to be American. We find out about antitrust policy briefly, but there is nothing on European competition policy - the cartel example at the end of chapter 14 is about US sports leagues - again nothing about the position in European sport.

When one does find a Eurocentric example, it is perhaps not best chosen to excite the student (for example, a discussion of the position of pensioners in the UK).

In Robert Frank's and Hal Varian's examples, there is again a lack of attention to the world-view of students - the balance of topics seems to be more reflective of the interests of teachers. Given that the books expound such a settled body of doctrine, it is not easy to identify differences in terms of content. Morgan et al's text does not have any "non-standard"

chapters, while Varian has three - a chapter on auctions, one on behavioural economics (added in this edition) and one on information technology (introduced in the fourth edition). These are clearly attempts to inject the kind of material that excites the American Economic Review and the Nobel Prize committee into core teaching.

The IT chapter is perhaps the least pleasing, as it seems to be more or less a string of examples rather than a coherent chapter of theoretical material. Frank provides non-standard material in part two, which is on consumer behaviour, with a chapter on altruism followed by one that is roughly equivalent to Varian's behavioural economics chapter. The rest of Frank's book is extremely standard - notably the section on firms and industries seems much narrower than his consumer section.

As it is hard to talk about microeconomic texts without resorting to clichés, I shall conclude by saying that these are books that "do what it says on the tin". One would have no qualms about recommending them on any appropriate course, as they are reliable and well explained in all cases.

A choice is hard to make on the basis of relevance or scope of the sorts of illustrative examples used, as there is not much difference here. Certainly there is a shortage of non-US-centred material in all three books. Given this, the choice of main text for an instructor will come down to personal taste and the hope of attaining the elusive nirvana of supremely stimulated students. For my money, Varian is the best in this regard.

Samuel Cameron is professor of economics, Bradford University.