FirstYearMPhil

First-Year M.Phil Microeconomics Lectures on Consumer and Producer Theory, Choice under Uncertainty, and Experimental Economics, University of Oxford, Michaelmas Term, 2010

Instructor: Professor Vincent Crawford

Office hours: by appointment

Lectures: Michaelmas Term:

Consumer and Producer Theory: weeks 1-3, Monday and Tuesday, 9:30-11:00

Choice under Uncertainty: week 4, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, 9:30-11:00

Experimental Economics: week 8, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, 9:30-11:00

The text for the Consumer and Producer Theory and Choice under Uncertainty segments is:

Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael Whinston, and Jerry Green, Microeconomic Theory, Oxford

University Press, 1995 ("MWG")

I strongly recommend that you buy MWG, which will be useful throughout your career.

The segment on Consumer and Producer Theory will cover choice, preferences, and utility, indirect utility, expenditure and cost functions, duality, and properties of demand and supply functions, following MWG, chapters 1-3 and 5.

(The topic of MWG, chapter 4, Aggregation, will be covered in Professor Quah's segment on General Equilibrium.)

The segment on Choice under Uncertainty will cover topics including expected utility, risk and risk aversion, and the state-preference approach, following MWG, chapter 6.

My slides for both of these segments follow MWG very closely, and so are not posted. The few differences between my slides and MWG will be highlighted in lectures.

Other helpful texts on Consumer and Producer Theory (all three) and (Kreps and Varian) Choice under Uncertainty include:

Angus Deaton and John Muellbauer, Economics and Consumer Behavior, Cambridge

University Press, 1980

David Kreps, A Course in Microeconomic Theory, Princeton University Press, 1990

Hal Varian, Microeconomic Analysis, 3rd ed. (2^nd ed. is fine) W.W. Norton & Co., 1992

The segment on Experimental Economics will give a brief introduction to experimental methods and results, with topics including competition in partial-equilibrium markets, discrimination in labor markets, measuring trust, unstructured bargaining, equilibrium selection via adaptive learning, and strategic communication of private information.

There is no text for this segment, but my slides for it are posted.

Course materials:

Syllabus for Consumer and Producer Theory and Choice under Uncertainty (pdf)

Practice Problems for Consumer and Producer Theory (pdf)

Practice Problems for Choice under Uncertainty (pdf)

(My lecture slides for consumer and producer theory and choice under uncertainty very closely follow MWG, chapters 1-3 and 5-6, and are therefore not posted. The few differences between my slides and MWG will be highlighted in lectures.)

Syllabus for Experimental Economics (pdf); Syllabus for Experimental Economics (htm)

Lecture Slides for Experimental Economics (for which there is no text) (pdf)

Practice Problems for Experimental Economics (pdf)

Vincent Crawford / University of Oxford Department of Economics / last modified 8 October 2010