Microeconomics (MSc Economics)
News
- I do not use ILIAS because I prefer openly accessible material and dislike parts of the terms of service. All material for this course is available on this website.
- calculator policy: calculators are neither needed nor allowed in the exam
- exam dates: Feb 5, 2026, 14:30 (HSA1) and March 16, 2026, 10:00 (Aula 2); registration via KLIPS
Course setup
Lecture: Thursdays, 14:00-15:30 (101 HS XXIII)
Exercise session: Wednesdays, 14:00-15:30 (118 S269)
Prerequisites: see schedule
Material
Slides and lecture notes (including exercises) are now also available on sciebo and maybe updated if necessary over the course of the term. (password announced in lecture only)
- old exam (note that the course changes slightly from year to year)
Textbooks
The provided lecture notes cover all topics. An alternative textbook is (Jehle and Reny (2011)). On auctions, Paul Klemperer's book (Klemperer (2004)) is an interesting (optional!) read but goes beyond the material covered in this course.
Schedule
The following schedule is subject to changes.
| Week | Topic | Exercises | Prerequisites |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | preference aggregation | tba | preferences (completeness, transitivity) |
| 2 | markets, prices, equilibrium | consumer problem, marginal rate of substitution, constrained optimization, compact sets | |
| 3 | decision making under uncertainty | discrete probability distribution, expected value, concavity and convexity of functions, closed sets | |
| 4 | Bayesian games I | probability distribution, expected value, normal form games, Nash equilibrium | |
| 5 | Bayesian games II | ||
| 6 | auctions I (IPV) | inverse functions, continuous probability distributions and their expectation | |
| 7 | auctions II (RET) | ||
| 8 | auctions III (design) | ||
| 9 | buffer/exercises | ||
| 10 | adverse selection | supply and demand | |
| 11 | PBE | game trees, subgame perfect Nash equilibrium | |
| 12 | signaling I | ||
| 13 | signaling II | ||
| 14 | Q&A |
On Prerequisites: If you are not familiar with one of the topics mentioned as prerequisite, please check wikipedia and you favorite generative AI model before coming to the lecture. If you favor a slower but more thorough approach, consult (Gibbons (1992)) or (Tadelis (2013)) for game theory, (Varian and Melitz (2024)) for microeconomics and (Sydsæter et al. (2022)) for mathematics.