The University of Chicago Department of Economics Winter 2017 Course: ECON 20100 Elements of Economic Analysis II Web:https://www.sites.google.com/site/richvanweelden/teaching/econ201w2017 Instructor: Richard Van Weelden Email: [email protected] Office: Saieh Hall for Economics 437 Office Phone: 773-702-7478 Office Hours: Monday 1:30-3:00 Teaching Assistants: Kuan-Ming Chen Email: [email protected] Office Hours: Tuesday 2:00-3:30 Location: Lobby Outside SHFE 146 Schedule: This class meets every Monday and Wednesday from 9:00 to 10:20 in SHFE 146. There is also a TA section on Thursdays from 4:00 to 4:50 in SHFE 146. The TA section will be spent answering student questions and presenting additional examples related to the material. Course Description: This course continues the study of microeconomics, picking up where ECON 200 left off. While ECON 200 focused on the behavior of individual consumers, in this course we focus on theory of the firm and study the interaction between firms and consumers. We begin by examining how firms allocate resources and determine how much to produce, and then move on to the study of how firms interact with consumers in a competitive environment in which neither individual firms nor consumers are large enough to influence the market price. After the midterm we study market power, first in the case of a monopolist and subsequently in oligopolistic environments in which multiple large firms are interacting with each other. We conclude the course with a study of public goods, externalities, and asymmetric information. Pre-requisite: ECON 200 Textbook and Lecture Notes: There are two recommended textbooks for this class: Hal Varian’s Intermediate Microeconomics available in the bookstore, and Victor Lima’s lecture notes available from the Social Sciences copy center on the first floor of 1126 E. 59th Street. The focus of this class will roughly correspond to Chapters 18 to 37 of Varian and Chapters 16 to 36 of Lima. In addition I will post course notes written in slide form on the course website. They will be posted before each class for those students who want to can print them out and follow along.

Evaluation: The evaluation for this class will consist of weekly problem sets, one midterm, and the final exam. The problem sets will be posted online in the middle of each week and are due in class the following Wednesday. Solutions to the problem sets will be posted on the website after class. Late assignments will not be accepted. However the problem set grade will be calculated after dropping the lowest problem set score. Any additional accommodations for problem sets require a reason verified by the student’s advisor. Students are encouraged to discuss the problems with their classmates but each student must write up their solutions independently and hand in their own problem set. The Midterm will take place in class on Wednesday, February 8 from 9:00 to 10:20 and the Final will take place on Monday, March 13 from 18:30-20:30. Any concerns about the way either exam was graded must be expressed in writing within two weeks of the exam being returned. If a correct answer was marked as incorrect I will award points to that question, but I will not reconsider the allocation of partial credit for incorrect answers. Students who decide not to take the class for a quality grade must inform me in writing of their intent to Withdraw or take the class Pass/Fail before the day of the Final Exam. The weights assigned to each component when calculating final grades are: Problem Sets: 20% Midterm: 30% Final: 50%