Microeconomics Competition And Strategic Behaviour

Microeconomics is not applied math – frameworks in this book are regularly in use in daily managerial practice and strategic decision-making. Numerous case studies cover price discrimination, economies of scale, digital business models, game theory, dealing with uncertainty, entry barriers or sunk costs – all of which are crucial for understanding market dynamics and competitive behaviour.

This volume contains sixteen original articles documenting recent progress in understanding strategic behaviour. In their variety they reflect an entire spectrum of coexisting approaches: from orthodox game theory via behavioural game theory, bounded rationality and economic psychology to experimental economics. There are plenty of new models and insights but the book also illustrates the boundaries of what we know today and explains the frontiers of tomorrow. The articles were written in honour of Werner Güth.

This volume discusses crucial issues in the overlap between industrial organization and strategic management.

Bowles and Halliday capture the intellectual excitement, analytical precision, and policy relevance of the new microeconomics that has emerged over the past decades. Drawing on themes of the classical economists from Smith through Marx and 20th century writers - including Hayek, Coase, and Arrow - the authors use twenty-first century analytical methods to address enduring challenges in economics. The subtitle of the work - Competition, conflict, and coordination - signals their focus on how the institutions of a modern capitalist economy work, introducing students to recent developments in the microeconomics of credit and labor markets with asymmetric information, a dynamic analysis of how firms compete going beyond price taking, as well as bargaining over the gains from exchange, social norms, and the exercise of power. The new benchmark model proposed by Bowles and Halliday is based on an empirical approach to economic actors and problems. They start from the premise that contracts are incomplete, and that as a result market failures, rather than being a special case illustrated by environmental spillovers, are to be expected in markets for labor, credit, knowledge and throughout the economy. They explain how experiments show that human motivations include ethical as well as other-regarding preferences (rather than entirely self-interested) and explain why the technologies of knowledge-based economies are a source of winner-take-all rather than stable competition. The authors also consider the intrinsic limits of mechanism design and governmental interventions in the economy. Teaching recent developments in microeconomic theory allows the authors to provide students with the tools to analyze and engage in informed debate on the issues that concern them most: climate change, inequality, innovation, and epidemic spread. Tradeoffs are highlighted by providing models in which capitalism can be seen as an "innovation machine" that raises material living standards on average, while at the same time sustaining levels of inequality that many find to be unfair. Digital formats and resources This title is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats and is supported by online resources. The e-book offers a mobile experience and convenient access to a variety of features that offer extra learning support. It allows students to engage in self-assessment activities, watch video material that further explains figures and mathematics, and offers the opportunity to work with interactive graphs to understand how the models work. Drawing on the authors' decades of teaching the new microeconomics, this title is supported by a range of online resources for students and lecturers including multiple-choice-questions with instant feedback, further mathematical and discussion-based questions, a fully customizable test bank for lecturer use, PowerPoint slides to accompany each chapter, worksheets that can be assigned to the class, and answers to the problems set in the book.

It is impossible to understand modern economics without knowledge of the basic tools of game theory and mechanism design. This book provides a graduate-level introduction to the economic modeling of strategic behavior. The goal is to teach economics doctoral students the tools of game theory and mechanism design that all economists should know.

The theory of competition has held a central place in economic analysis since Adam Smith. This book, written by one of the most distinguished of contemporary economic theorists, reports on a major research program to provide strategic foundations for the theory of perfect competition. Beginning with a concise survey of how the theory of competition has evolved, Gale makes extensive and rigorous use of dynamic matching and bargaining models to provide a more complete description of how a competitive equlibrium is achieved. Whereas economists have made use of a macroscopic description of markets in which certain behavioral characteristics, such as price-taking behavior, are taken for granted, Gale uses game theory to re-evaluate this assumption, beginning with individual agents and modelling their strategic interaction. A strategic foundation for competitive equilibrium shows how such interaction leads to competitive, price-taking behavior. Essential reading for graduate courses in game theory and general equilibrium.