ABSTRACT
In economics, there are many problems which require us to take into account how a function value changeswith respect to small changes of the independent variable (e.g. input, time, etc.). For example, assume that the price of someproduct changes slightly. The question is howdoes this affect the amount of product customers will buy? A useful tool for such investigations is differential calculus, which we treat in this chapter. It is an important field of mathematics withmany applications, e.g. graphing functions, determination of extreme points of functions with or without additional constraints. Differential calculus allows us to investigate specific properties of functions such as monotonicity or convexity. For instance in economics, cost, revenue, profit, demand, production or utility functions have to be investigated with respect to their properties. In this chapter, we consider functions f : Df → R depending on one real variable, i.e. Df ⊆ R.
