A Course in Microeconomic Theory

By David M. Kreps. 2020

1,286 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This book is a text in microeconomics that is both challenging and “user-friendly.” The work is designed for the first-year graduate microeconomic theory course and is accessible to advanced undergraduates as well. Placing unusual emphasis on modern noncooperative game theory, it provides the student and instructor with a unified treatment of modern microeconomic theory — one that stresses the behavior of the individual actor (consumer or firm) in various institutional settings. The author has taken special pains to explore the fundamental assumptions of the theories and techniques studied, pointing out both strengths and weaknesses. The book begins with an exposition of the standard models of choice and the market, with extra attention paid to choice under uncertainty and dynamic choice. General and partial equilibrium approaches are blended, so that the student sees these approaches as points along a continuum. The work then turns to more modern developments. Readers are introduced to noncooperative game theory and shown how to model games and determine solution concepts. Models with incomplete information, the folk theorem and reputation, and bilateral bargaining are covered in depth, followed by exploration of information economics. A closing discussion concerns firms as organizations and gives readers a taste of transaction-cost economics.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d06e77775813e66b3d93e2e4ea69c85bae62b5a3

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Citations in the corpus

Adaptive stochastic resonance (1998, background): “This has the same form as the result in microeconomics [140] that the marginal rates of substitution of two goods must at optimality equal the partial derivatives of the utility function with respect to each good.”
The Economics of Governance (2005, neutral): “Again, the answers reside in the microanalytics, an examination of which discloses that reputation effects can be costly and experience breakdowns (Kreps, 1990a; Williamson, 1991a, pp. 166-172; Tirole, 1996).”
Experimental practices in economics: A methodological challenge for psychologists? (2001, background): “…game-theoretic reframing, over the past dozen years, of nearly every field in economics – from microeconomic and industrial organization theory (e.g., Kreps 1990; Tirole 1988) to macroeconomic policy issues (Barro 1990) – provided a unifying theoretical framework that could easily be translated…”
The Entrepreneur's Choice between Private and Public Ownership (2006, background): “In this sense, we are following Kreps (1990) (p.370) who argues that the assumption of homogeneous priors has “little basis in philosophy or logic.””
Contracting and Information Sharing Under Supply Chain Competition (2008, background): “The contract design problem, called Problem , is formulated as follows: Problem max QHi THi QLi TLi THi+ 1− TLi (9) subject to fH QHi qHj − THi ≥ fH QLi qHj − TLi (10) fL QLi qLj − TLi ≥ fL QHi qLj − THi (11) fH QHi qHj − THi ≥ 0 (12) D ow nl oa de d fr om in fo rm s. or g by [ 13 0.”
Securities lending, shorting, and pricing (2002, neutral): “This is an equilibrium outcome of Nash (1950) bargaining, and can be justified by an alternating-offer game with risk of breakdown (Binmore, Rubinstein, and Wolinsky (1986)),(19) or by a simultaneous-offer bargaining game (Kreps (1990)).”
The Risk of Resource Misappropriation in Community-Driven Development (2003, background): “…uncertainty exists regarding the payoffs or some doubts about the rationality of other players, the inefficient outcome (the leader embezzles the funds) is as unavoidable in a finitely repeated game as in a one-period game (Kreps and Wilson, 1982; Kreps, 1990 : 536-43 ; Friedman, 1990 : 190-4).”
Monitoring Elite Capture in Community‐Driven Development (2004, result): “As we know from repeated game theory, however, as long as the duration of the game is finite, and no matter how high is the number of periods in the game, the equilibrium outcome will be the same as that obtaining in the oneperiod game (Kreps and Wilson 1982 ; Kreps 1990: 536-43).”