Exercises
Exams
Readings
Books for Checkout
Edgeworth Box Applet
Professor: Mark Walker.
Office hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 1:00 to 1:45, McClelland 401K,
or send me an email to arrange a time to meet:
mwalker@arizona.edu
Teaching Assistant: Tim Flannery (tflanne1@email.arizona.edu)
Textbook: The course lecture notes will primarily serve as the textbook for the course. The notes are available at the Lecture Notes page of this website. Several actual textbooks are good additional resources:
Books Available for Checkout: All five of the books above, and several others you might find useful, are available for checkout from the Department's Barr Library. Checkout forms are available here.
2. Market equilibrium.
Focus on prices and quantities. Single market ("partial")
equilibrium. Need for a "general" equilibrium analysis. Pure
exchange model and Edgeworth box. Definition of equilibrium; the
implicit role of time; price-taking behavior. Comparative statics
and the Implicit Function Theorem. Existence of market equilibrium.
Robustness with respect to the assumptions.
3. Welfare considerations.
Pareto improvements, Pareto ordering, Pareto efficiency. The two "classical"
welfare theorems. Minkowski's theorem. Characterization by marginal
conditions. Social welfare function; aggregation; Arrow's Theorem.
4. Market equilibrium and welfare with production.
Fisher's separation theorem. The "adding-up" problem: surplus and profit.
Returns-to-scale phenomena. Marginal conditions with production.
5. Recontracting equilibrium (the core).
Recontracting (unilateral improvements by subgroups). Market equilibrium and
the core. The importance of the "size" of the economy. The "core-equivalence"
theorem. The continuum model of large economies.
6. "Imperfect Competition."
Monopoly: Price-setting behavior. Strategic equilibrium: Cournot, Bertrand,
Stackelberg.
7. Non-price-taking behavior.
Price-setting behavior by an individual unit. Strategic behavior in general:
Noncooperative game theory, Nash equilibrium, and the Prisoners' Dilemma.
Entry deterrence and the Chain Store Paradox. Strategic market equilibrium and
its relation to competitive equilibrium and Pareto efficiency. The importance
of the number of participants. Auctions.
8. Externalities.
External economies and diseconomies. Pigovian taxes and subsidies. Strategic
problems. Public goods. Lindahl equilibrium, Arrow-Debreu equilibrium, and
the role of the size of markets (with and without externalities).
9. Uncertainty, time, and incomplete markets.
Modeling uncertainty and information. Securities, forward and spot markets, and
Arrow-Debreu equilibrium. Incomplete markets, temporary equilibrium, and
rational expectations.
10. Other topics, as time permits.
Overlapping generations models. Disequilibrium behavior and stability. Voting
and aggregation of preferences.
Note: Economics 501C covers game theory, informational issues (such as asymmetric information, signalling, moral hazard), and mechanism design, and some of these topics are therefore treated only briefly, if at all, in Economics 501B.
An Exercise Book is available for the course. Solutions for some of the exercises will be made available as well. Weekly exercises will be assigned from the Exercise Book. Most weeks one or two of the assigned exercises will be graded. There may occasionally be a brief quiz at the end of a lecture; the quiz will be one of the exercises you were assigned earlier, or very similar to one of the exercises.
There will be at least one mid-term exam and a comprehensive final exam. The course grade will be determined mostly by performance on the final exam, in the following way: If you do at least as well on the final exam as you did on the midterm exam, the final exam grade will be your course grade. But if you do worse on the final exam, then the midterm exam, the exercises, and the quizzes will be taken into account in determining your course grade.
Mark Walker's Home Page