The successful handbook by Hal R. Varian and Marc J. Melitz emphasizes the fundamental conceptual foundations of microeconomics. The authors present all the essential steps of a reasoning process, and students reconstruct them, reinforcing the covered topics.

The updated 4th Greek (10th American) edition includes, among other things, the following: use of the utility function to estimate the impact of price changes on welfare (inflation, food prices after the COVID-19 pandemic), presentation of imperfect substitutes and imperfect complementary goods, presentation of the distributional effects of increases in gasoline taxation.

New examples include: "Who pays a tariff on imports?", "How was welfare affected by President Trump's trade war?", "Competition with imports from China and cost increases," "How much monopsony power do employers have in the US?". New sections include: "Exchanges between food banks and benefits from trade" and "Pollution taxes and pollution permit trading," with materials on cap-and-trade policies and emissions rights trading.