Intro is taught assuming perfect markets, with caveats. You are one of the rare outstanding students who remembers the caveats! This book's approach is to intro

Intro is taught assuming perfect markets, with caveats. You are one of the rare outstanding students who remembers the caveats! This book's approach is to introduce a general model of strategic interactions, and then discusses perfect competition as a special case (much later in the book). This is big part of what makes the book more realistic than the conventional approach.