The Economics of Asymmetric Information and Contracts

Catalog description

This course provides an introduction to the economics of asymmetric information, contracts and mechanism design. Topics covered include: bilateral contracting problems with moral hazard and/or adverse selection, bargaining with asymmetric information, the design of optimal auctions and other multilateral mechanisms, signaling and incomplete contacts. Prerequisites include intermediate microeconomics and statistics. The student is expected to be comfortable with basic probability (random variables, expectation, independence, and conditional probability) and calculus.