The course provides a graduate level introduction to Industrial Organization. It is designed to provide a broad introduction to topics and industries that current researchers are studying as well as to expose students to a wide variety of techniques. It will start the process of preparing economics Ph.D. students to conduct thesis research in the area, and may also be of interest to doctoral students working in other areas of economics and related fields. The course integrates theoretical models and empirical studies.
The course presumes that students have a familiarity with micro theory, basic game theory and some econometrics.
The primary text for the course is Jean Tirole’s, The Theory of Industrial Organization, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. ISBN: 0262200716). The text provides an overview of most of the theoretical topics. The text will be supplemented with a large number of recent journal articles listed below. The starred readings are required. Many of these articles are easily accessible via JSTOR - The Scholarly Journal Archive. A reading packet contains some of the harder to find starred articles in the reading list. Some others are on reserve at Dewey library. We will also be reading several articles from R. Schmalensee and R. Willig, eds., Handbook of Industrial Organization (New York: North Holland, 1989. ISBN: 0444704361.).
The course will be graded on the basis of eight problem sets, a midterm, and a three-hour final exam. The teaching assistant will teach a recitation for 1.5 hours.