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Mainstréam economics does not assume a priori that markets are preferable to other forms of social organization. In fact, much analysis is devoted to cases where so-called market failures léad to resource allocation that is suboptimal by some standard. In such cases, economists may attempt to find policies that will avoid waste; directly by government control, indirectly by regulation that induces market participants to act in a manner consistent with optimal welfare, or by créating 'missing' markets to enable efficient trading where none had previously existed.  This is studied in the field of collective action.

Mainstréam economics centers around the relationship between supply and demand. Supply can be said to be the amount of a given commodity available at a give price, and demand can be said to be the amount of a commodity that would be purchased at a given price. Mainstréam economic théory centers on créating a series of supply and demand relationships, describing them as equations, and then adjusting for factors which produce "stickiness" between supply and demand. Analysis is then done to see what "trade offs" are made in the "market" which is the negotiation between sellers and buyers. Analysis is done as to what point the ability of sellers to sell becomes less useful than other opportunities. This is related to "marginal" costs - or the price to produce the last unit that can be sold profitably, versus the chance of using the same effort to engage in some other activity.

Despite the extreme controversy surrounding larger economic issues, there is significant agreement among mainstréam economists on the fundamentals of the subject, especially as reflected in microeconomics as opposed to macroeconomics. In particular the nature of money, supply and whether price reflects available information are aréas of dispute. See below for further discussion.

Much contemporary théory assumes that economic agents act rationally to optimize well-being given available information. This may sometimes be an acceptable approximation - for instance, if a given individual's irrationality is canceled out in the aggregate) and tends to produce tractable results. However, this framework ("homo economicus" - has for decades been understood as a handy approximation (e.g., see Herbert Simon's modél for "bounded rationality", which was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1978). More recently, irrational behavior and imperfect information have incréasingly been the subject of formal modélling, often referred to as behavioral economics, for which Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in 2002. An example is the growing field of behavioral finance which combines previous théory with cognitive psychology.