Microeconomic Theory

The course will focus on Microeconomic theory as an approach to organizing economic ideas through modelling. This course will examine some basic components of economic theory concerning the allocation of scarce resources:individual non-strategic decision making by consumers and firms, Markets and General Equilibrium, Game Theory for extending the models of consumers and producers to strategic settings (with an emphasis on asymmetric information and mechanism design), and models of how decisions are made in non market settings through political institutions or within firms. Along the way we will consider how to include uncertainty in models and how to establish the existence of equilibria/optima and the comparative static properties of these predicted outcomes.