07:20 PM to 10:00 PM R
Planetary Hall 124
Section Information for Fall 2017
We’ll spend the next few months covering the basics of optimal choice in continuous time, multivariate optimization, and the classic post-war microeconomics of individual and firm-level optimization. There’s alas much less emergence, less endogeneity, in this course than in most of economics, but on the other hand many of these tools are key ingredients in more sophisticated models.
Skills I take entirely for granted: Elementary differential calculus (univariate and multivariate), elementary integration (univariate), basic matrix/linear algebra (addition, multiplication, inversion), univariate optimization, and logarithms, logarithms, logarithms.
Assigned Textbooks (tentative):
Chiang and Wainwright, Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics, 4th edition.
Quite good on optimization theory, and covers a lot of widely-used models along the way. It covers only a few rarely used topics, and I’ve skipped almost all of them. The new section on continuous time, with which we start the course, is quite good.
Varian, Microeconomic Analysis, 3rd edition, 1992.
Varian’s text is at the intersection of most readable and wisest of the graduate microeconomics textbooks. An emeritus professor at Berkeley, he is now Chief Economist at Google, and coauthored perhaps the first great popular book on the economics of the internet, Information Rules. His academic theories were surely derided long ago as unrealistic and irrelevant to the real world. We should all be so irrelevant.
ECON 830 001 is controlled. Contact econgrad@gmu.edu for information.
Credits: 3
Enrollment limited to students with a class of Advanced to Candidacy, Graduate or Non-Degree.
Students in a Non-Degree Undergraduate degree may not enroll.
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