The course will focus on Microeconomic theory as an approach to organizing economic ideas through modelling.

This course will examine some basic components of economic theory concerning the allocation of scarce resources:individual non-strategic decision making by consumers and firms, Markets and General Equilibrium, Game Theory for extending the models of consumers and producers to strategic settings (with an emphasis on asymmetric information and mechanism design), and models of how decisions are made in non market settings through political institutions or within firms.

Along the way we will consider how to include uncertainty in models and how to establish the existence ofequilibria/optima and the comparative static properties of these predicted outcomes.

Upon successful completion of the requirements for this course, students will be able to:

1. Individual Decision Makers: State and prove the fundamental properties of consumer and producer behaviour in neoclassical economics
2. Markets: explain and apply the results of, Game Theory and General Equilibrium in understanding the properties of basic market structures.
3. Mechanism Design: use mechanism design techniques to establish the structure of optimal incentive contracts and apply contract design to solve economic problems.
4. Uncertainty: explain and apply the results of, and methods used in, expected utility theory
5. Non-market allocation: state and prove the fundamental results of social choice, voting and managerial hierarchies; know the characteristics of some practical solutions to non-market allocation systems.
6. Modelling: Describe relevant economic situations as games or optimization problems.
7. Solving: Use curvature and monotonicity properties to establish the solutions and comparative static properties for relevant economic models.  

• Assignment           15%
• Midsession Exam   15%
• Spot Quiz              10%
• Examonation         60%

• 2 hour a week: lecture
• 1 hour a week to the modelling workshop (approx.)
• 6 hours a week: reading, research, group work, writing and assignment
• 1 hours a week: tutorials and seminars

At least an average of 65% (or equivalent) in the final two years of an Australian undergraduate degree with introductory level courses in Economics, Statistics and Econometrics.

Please see Course Website