Teaching Opportunity Cost and Incentives through Internal Audit Cases in Undergraduate Economics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1997/ffv61q45Keywords:
economics education, case teaching, internal audit, opportunity cost, incentives, economic reasoning, higher educationAbstract
Undergraduate economics courses often require students to explain resource allocation while giving them limited practice in evaluating the documents and competing claims through which allocation decisions are made. This conceptual article develops a case teaching model that converts internal audit situations into structured opportunities to learn opportunity cost, marginal analysis, information asymmetry, and incentives. A purposive synthesis of economic education, instructional alignment, problem based learning, and professional audit standards informs the design. The proposed model requires each case to connect a documented observation to an economic mechanism, an explicit alternative, and a defensible recommendation. Its principal contribution is a translation procedure that prevents audit cases from becoming exercises in procedural compliance alone.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Sukhrob Akhmedov (Author)

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