Topics in Economic Theory

This course is a topics course on some issues in economic theory. Part of the course will be taught by Guilherme Carmona, who will focus on dynamic games. The course covers the theory of repeated games with complete information, including:

• The one-shot deviation property
• Automaton representation of strategies
• Sufficiency of simple strategies
• The Folk Theorem

  The applications are likely to include:

• Bounded memory
• Dynamic risk sharing
• Multi-person bargaining
• Social learning

The second part of the course will be taught by Robert Evans, who will cover various topics in contract theory and strategic communication theory. These are likely to include incomplete-contracts theory, property rights theory, relational contracts, and the Crawford-Sobel analysis of cheap talk and its applications to the theory of organizations.