ECON 278 - Industrial Organization and Firm Behavior (Spring 2017)

Syllabus

Schedule an introductory meeting: I like to meet with students individually for 10-15 minutes to learn more about you, your goals as a student generally, and your goals as a student in this course. It's very much casual. It's also optional, but I strongly encourage you to participate. To sign up for a slot, click the link to the left and pick a time in the Doodle poll. If none of these slots works for you, send me an email and we can work out an alternative. Meetings are in my office, Willis 309.

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Microeconomics review materials (in particular, see lecture slides--associated videos, when available, may also be helpful)

Lecture slides and notes: (blue subtopics below link to YouTube videos on those topics; italicized subtopics are optional and will not be covered on exams)

• Producer Theory 1: Intro; production; isoquants and isocosts; minimizing cost; cost curve.
• Producer Theory 2: Types of costs; maximizing profits; minimizing losses; supply.
• Producer Theory 3: Market supply; elasticity; long-run; capital and investment; present values.
• Markets and Efficiency 1: Markets; demand shocks; supply shocks, surplus and efficiency.
• Monopoly: Intro; marginal revenue; welfare analysis; Lerner index; policy.
• Cartels: Cartels; game theory, nash equilibrium, prisoner's dilemma, finitely repeated games; infinitely repeated games,
• Oligopoly: Cournot, Bertrand, Stackelberg.
• Monopolistic competition: Monopolistic competition.
• Price discrimination: Theory; welfare; a non-example.
• Strategy (my neatly handwritten notes).
• Information: Adverse selection; signaling and screening; moral hazard.
• Location models (my neatly handwritten notes).
• Antitrust (my not-so-neatly handwritten notes).
• Patents and technological change (my not-so-neatly handwritten notes).
• Exercises and experiment on research prizes

Problem Sets: 1 (Solutions), 2 (Solutions), 3 (Solutions), 4 (Solutions), 5 (Solutions), Antitrust case studies

Exams: Midterm 1 (Solutions, Results), Midterm 2 (Solutions, Results), Final (Solutions, Results)

Practice Problems: 1 (Solutions), 2 (Solutions), 3 (Solutions), 4 (Solutions), 5 (Solutions)

Non-textbook readings:

• "Too much of a good thing"
• "Monopoly is Not a Game"
• "Price discrimination land: Disney discovers peak pricing"
• "His-counts and her-charges"
• "The dystopian future of price discrimination"
• "Time to fix patents"
• "Bitter fight over CRISPR patent heats up"
• "Should you be able to patent a human gene?"
• "In defense of gene patenting"
• "FDA ban on CFCs in asthma inhalers raised costs for patients, new study finds"
• "Why you're paying more to breathe"

Papers we discussed: Hotelling (1929), d'Aspremont et. al (1979)