Almost all (if not all) textbooks used in MBA students' first course in microeconomics are designed with undergraduate economics majors or first-year PhD students in mind. Accordingly, MBA students are often treated to a course in intermediate microeconomic theory, full of arcane mathematical explanations. The applications in such standard textbooks deal mainly with the impact of social or government policies on markets with little discussion of how managers can make better decisions within their firms in response to market forces or how market forces can be expected to affect firms' institutional and financial structures.

Much microeconomic theory simply assumes firms into existence without explanation of why they are needed in the first place. Managers and their staff are assumed to do exactly what firms employ them to do – maximize owners' profits – with no discussion of how firms' organizational structures affect incentives and how incentives affect firms' production and profit outcomes.

That is to say, little is written in standard textbooks used in MBA courses about exactly how real-world firms pursue the goal of profit maximization. And that void in microeconomics textbooks is a real problem for MBA students, for an obvious reason: MBA students have typically come back to school to learn how to improve their management skills, which involves learning about how they can improve their ability to extract more profits from the scarce resources available to the firms where they work (or the firms where they expect to move after graduation).