Advanced Microeconomics (Master Economic Research)

• Please watch the screencasts on Dominance and rationalizability (01-03) before coming to the first class.

• exam date: July 17, 14:00-15:00 in the usual lecture room

• Thursday, 14:00-17:30, Seminarraum S243 (101/01/1.303)

Each week you have either to watch some screencasts or to read a book chapter before coming to class. In class, you then have the possibility to ask questions about the material (and I might ask you a few questions to see whether things are clear). Afterwards we do the exercises. In terms of preparation, you have to watch the screencasts (or read the book chapter). Furthermore, you have to read through the exercises on the respective topic and think roughly 10 minutes about each of them. (Don't be discouraged if you do not manage to solve them quickly. Some of them are quite challenging.) One organizational remark: as we have only one projector, it is useful to bring a printout of the exercises with you to class.

• link to screencasts and book chapters
• old exam
• Exercises: pdf, solutions for some exercises not covered in class
• Slides:
  • Dominance and rationalizability
  • Nash Theorem
  • BNE
  • auctions
  • SPNE
  • PBE
  • signaling
  • revelation principle
  • dominant strat. implementation
  • Myerson Satterthwaite
  • screening

• Handouts etc.:
  • math handout
  • notes (occassionally updated)
  • envelope theorem and monotonicity constraint

I assume that you have some introductory knowledge of game theory on the level of (Gibbons (1992)). In particular, you should know the material in chapters 1 and 2 in Gibbons' book (strategic form games, dominance, mixed strategies, mixed and pure Nash equilibrium, extensive form games, game trees, backwards induction, subgame perfect Nash equilibrium) and be able to apply it in simple games. From Advanced Microeconomics I, we build upon the part about decision making under uncertainty (expected utility theorem). In terms of mathematics, it is helpful to master the material of the course Advanced Mathematics for Economists. Having said that, most of the used math tools will not be far beyond high school maths. At the minimum you have to know (partial) differentiation, integration and optimization of functions and basic statistics (discrete and continuous probability distributions, expected values as well as Bayes' rule and conditional probabilities). More importantly, you should also have some idea of what a mathematical proof is. There is a handout on maths covering some of the prerequisites and topics that people tend to forget about quickly.

Most material is covered in (Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green (1995)) which is abbreviated MWG in the following. Roughly speaking, we will cover chapters 8, 9, 13 and 23 from this book.

Some other interesting books on game theory covering the course material partially are

• (Fudenberg and Tirole (1991)) (FT): Covers an impressive amount of material in considerable depth at PhD level. Some of the proofs are, however, not fully worked out.
• (Maschler, Solan, and Zamir (2013)) (MSZ): Impresses with very clear proofs and fully worked out examples. Do, however, not expect to find much economics in this book.
• (Osborne and Rubinstein (1994)) (OR). A very nice book that is freely available for download from the authors' websites.

For mechanism design, (Börgers (2015)) is an excellent source which naturally covers much more than we do in the course.

The following plan is…well a plan…and as such it might be adapted to unforseen circumstances if necessary.