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- Code:
- ECOK-282
- Field:
- Microeconomics
- Target:
- Bachelor's students
- Organiser:
- University of Helsinki - Economics
- Instructor:
- Michele Crescenzi
- Period:
- Period 4
- Format:
- Lecture
- Method:
- Contact teaching
- Venue:
- Economicum
- Enrollment:
In case of conflicting information consider the Sisu/Course/Moodle pages the primary source of information.
Aalto and Hanken economics students can enroll in their home university’s SISU! Further instructions can be found on the How to enroll page, also for other students.
Before taking and completing the course make sure that the credits can be counted towards your degree at your home university by checking which courses are included in your curriculum or by contacting your home university’s student/learning services.
- To access the Moodle course area, use all the features and participate in the activities (assignments, discussions), you must have successfully registered for the course in Sisu and logged in with your UH user ID.
- For more information on how to activate your UH user ID and register for a Moodle course area, click here.
Content
The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, we study the concepts from game theory that are needed to understand market design and the functioning of auctions. These include the notions of dominating and dominated strategies, and the equilibrium analysis of games played under incomplete information. The second part of the course deals with auctions. We begin by examining the theoretical properties of the most common formats of auction. Then we study how auctions are run in several applications, including double auctions in financial markets and auctions used by Internet search engines to sell advertising. The final part of the course is devoted to matching markets. We study both two-sided and one-sided matching. In two-sided matching, there are two sets of agents—e.g., students and colleges—and each agent can be matched with only one agent of the other side. In one-sided matching, there is a set of agents and a set of indivisible objects—e.g., employees and office rooms—, and the goal is to match each agent with a distinct good. We study how to find optimal matches and examine their properties. Applications include kidney exchange, i.e., how to match donors with patients in kidney transplantation.
Learning outcomes
The goal of the course is to introduce students to the design of practical mechanisms for the allocation of resources. The course combines theory and applications, with an emphasis on the latter. Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:
1) understand how different types of auctions work,
2) examine how resources are allocated when prices cannot be used, e.g., how to allocate kidney donors to transplantation patients,
3) apply tools from economics and game theory to the design of practical allocation mechanisms.