Econ306

Notices

Outline

The topics to be covered are partly listed below. The readings will be updated (and augmented) as the course proceeds, so make sure to check here for updates.

There will be four assignments, due dates tba. You will need to hand in completed versions of the assignments, then you will be expected to correct your exam and resubmit it the week later. Assignments are worth 20% of the final mark. The midterm and final are each worth 40% of the final mark. The midterm will be held is tba.

Missed assignments will not be counted in your mark. Missed Miderm tests will result in weight being shifted to the final exam. In either case, you must notify me by the day after the exam. A missed final exam will be rewritten in the next available sitting, probably mid to late summer.

To prepare for the course, make sure you understand the mathematics that is described in the Math Tutorial below. There is no required textbook for the course. Many of the lectures cover material that is covered in Preston McAfee's online text, but the readings that are listed (and will be listed) here are all that is required for the course. You can get the pdf version of McAfee's book at http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/IEA.pdf. There is a printed version with nicer graphs and additional problems that you can get from http://www.introecon.com, but you shouldn't need this, and we will only follow a small bit of the book.

Math Preparation

  • This link leads to a math tutorial written by Martin Osborne at U of Toronto. It contains most of what you will need to know about math as an economics student. Browse through to refresh your knowledge, then go back to it when you encounter a mathematical concept that you don't understand. Martin Osborne's Tutorial.
  • This year we'll be working with a bunch of software. You can find all the software you'll probably ever want to use in economics on https://vse.syzygy.ca. This includes a program called sagemath which is useful for doing symbolic an computational math. The site includes the statistical software package R, python 2 and 3 (use version 3 when you can because version 2 is deprecated now). There is also the software Julia which is used for computations. You can install any of these software programs on your own computer if you are patient enough.
  • I'll put the jupyter notebooks we'll be using for the course on Github. You'll eventually need to learn git, but you won't need an account on github. The website does a really good job of displaying jupyter notebooks so I'll put links to github notebooks on the web page.

Basic Game Theory

The first part of the course covers basic game theory. It then proceeds to show you how this theory is used in some very well known economics problems.

  • Matching and Deferred Acceptance
  • Auctions