625 Syllabus

SI 625, Fall Term 2002

Microeconomics for Information Professionals

Syllabus

Time and Location:	Friday 9-12 a.m., 412 West Hall
Office:	243 West Hall (Fall 2002 only)
Telephone:	764-3271 (Fall 2002 only)
E-mail address:	yanchen@umich.edu
Course Home Page:	http://www.si.umich.edu/~yanchen/
Office Hours	Thursday 3:00 - 5:00 p.m. and by appointment

Required Text:

Managerial Economics: Applications, Strategy and Tactics by McGuigan, Moyer and Harris, 9th edition. The publisher provides a website with supplemental material at http://mcguigan.swcollege.com.

Course Description:

This is a standard course in "intermediate microeconomics," designed with School of Information MSI students as the primary audience. Except for relying more heavily on examples drawn from problems involving information goods, services, technologies and organizations, and discussing a few topics that are especially relevant to information, the content and style of the course is quite similar to advanced undergraduate and first-year master's classes in economics departments and graduate schools of public policy, management, and public health, among others. This is not a specialized course in the economics of information; SI 646 is a follow-on course that serves that purpose. To be well-prepared for management, policy and analysis in the information professions you need to first have a solid grounding in standard microeconomic theory and its applications to problem solving. Thus, the primary objective is to teach you a set of useful theories and how to apply them to solve problems. The emphasis is on method and application. You will, consequently, be expected to do a lot of problem-solving homework. It is essential to practice the skills if you want to learn how to use them (and to succeed in the course).

Course Requirements:

There will be approximately 10 homework assignments. You can drop the lowest score. I strongly encourage you to form "partnerships" of two or three persons to work on your homework problems. Partnerships can turn in a single homework, signed by all members.

There will be some in-class experiments to help you learn certain theoretical concepts. Participate in all experiments. I hope that you will find learning economic theory through experiments to be fun.

There will be two in-class midterms on 10/11 and 12/6. There will be no final exam.

Basis for Course Grades

Homework 20%: In order to receive credit for a homework assignment, you must turn it in on time.

Midterms 80%: Your grade for the midterms will be the sum of both midterm scores. There will be no make-up midterms.

Performance in Experiments: We will record the payoffs that you receive in the experiments over the course of the semester. Your total payoffs will be normalized and converted to a score. Your score on experiments may be used to adjust a grade up or down by a half step if you are on the boundary, but otherwise will not affect the final grade.