Microeconomics I, Microeconomics II and Microeconomics III

Experimental Economics Within the past few decades, experimental economics has proven useful in testing the validity of standard economic theories. When human behaviour departures from standard theories, new theories are constructed to better explain the data. Economic experiments replicate real-word incentives and are conducted either in the laboratory or in the field. This course will review some active research areas in experimental economics. The course will also cover important methodological tools used in designing, running and making use of experimental data. Economics of social networks Networks pervade socio-economic life. They also pervade our discipline. The work in the area has connections with many different sub-fields of game theory, from cooperative games, to refinements, evolutionary games, bargaining and other interesting topics. At the same time there are numerous applications in different fields. Just to name a few: industrial organization, labor economics, organization theory and information theory. So I expect this course to be of interest to people coming from many different backgrounds.

Experimental Economics lecture topics: 1. Practical aspects of experimental design. 2. Cheap talk: language evolution (Blume et al, 1998, 2001); Lying aversion (Sanchez-Pages and Vorsatz, 2007; Wang et al, 2010); Deception (Gneezy 2005); Promises (Charness and Dufwenberg 2006); market for information (Cabrales et al. 2020). 3. Trust, and social preferences: trust (Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe, 1995, Zak and Knack 2001, Algan and Cahuc 2010, Johnson and Mislin 2010), trust and institutions (Aghion et al. 2010, Pinotti 2012, Cabrales et al. 2020), trust and reflection (Rand 2016, Cabrales et al. 2017), Social preferences (Fehr and Schmidt 1999, Charness and Rabin 2002, Levitt and List 2007, Cabrales et al. 2010, Cabrales and Ponti 2017). 4. Political economy: Voting (Palfrey 2009); market for votes (Casella, Llorente-Saguer, Palfrey 2012); redistribution (Cabrales, Nagel, Rodríguez-Mora 2012). 5. Experiments in networks: coordination (Keser et al. 1998, Berninghaus et al 2002, Cassar 2007), strategic complements games (Gallo and Yan 2015), strategic substitutes games (Rosenkrantz and Weitzel 2012, Goyal et al. 2017). Social networks lecture topics: 1. Network formation: stability and efficiency (Jackson and Wolinsky 1996). 2. Games played on networks I, strategic complements (Ballester, Calvó-Armengol and Zenou 2006, Cabrales, Calvó-Armengol and Zenou 2011). 3. Games played on networks II, strategic substitutes (Bramoullé and Kranton 2007, 2014). 4. Games played on networks III, information and coordination (Morris 2000, Chwe 2000, Galeotti and Goyal 2010). 5. Financial contagion in networks (Acemoglu, Ozdaglar, and Tahbaz-Salehi 2015, Elliott, Golub and Jackson 2014, Cabrales, Gale and Gottardi 2016, Cabrales, Gottardi and Vega-Redondo 2017).

There will be lectures in which students are expected to have read the material and participate actively and critically towards the material, as is usual in a community of researchers. After 3 weeks of lectures, there is a week of student project presentations. Then another three weeks of lectures and another of student project presentations.