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 | | Microeconomic Theory by Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston, Jerry R. Green ISBN-10: 9780195073409 ISBN-10: 0-19-507340-1 ISBN-13: 9780195073409 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-507340-9 Hardcover 1995-06-15 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Many instructors of microeconomic theory have been waiting for a text that provides balanced and in-depth analysis of the essentials of microeconomics. Masterfully combining the results of years of teaching microeconomics at Harvard University, Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael Whinston, and Jerry Green have filled that conspicuous vacancy with their groundbreaking text, Microeconomic Theory. The authors set out to create a solid organizational foundation upon which to build the effective teaching tool for microeconomic theory. The result presents unprecedented depth of coverage in all the essential topics, while allowing professors to "tailor-make" their course to suit personal priorities and style. Topics such as noncooperative game theory, information economics, mechanism design, and general equilibrium under uncertainty receive the attention that reflects their stature within the discipline. The authors devote an entire section to game theory alone, making it "free-standing" to allow instructors to return to it throughout the course when convenient. Discussion is clear, accessible, and engaging, enabling the student to gradually acquire confidence as well as proficiency. Extensive exercises within each chapter help students to hone their skills, while the text's appendix of terms, fully cross-referenced throughout the previous five sections, offers an accessible guide to the subject matter's terminology. Teachers of microeconomics need no longer rely upon scattered lecture notes to supplement their textbooks. Deftly written by three of the field's most influential scholars, Microeconomic Theory brings the readability, comprehensiveness, and versatility to the first-year graduate classroom that has long been missing. | ||
Reviews | ||
More than p1000 Nothing special. I needed this for my coursework. It will be useful for economics dictionary purpose. | ||
great reference text Mas-Colell is a great text to have on the shelf of any graduate student of econcomics. I am working on my Phd, and I refer to it whenever I need to establish a firm understanding of any Microeconomic theory. | ||
Funny and Humorous This book is aimed at economics grad students. Usually economics grad students are guys who are trying too hard to be accepted by an established "academic community". Since most of them lack self-esteem, real world experience and confidence, they must find a way to show the world how smart and special they are. So those people accept being fed such a nonsense like this material. Dont be fooled. The pseudo-scientific kind of math this book adopts does not add to real world analysis or understanding of a single economic problem. Its all "math rhetoric" to impress the layman. The economics that really matters is as real as sex. If you have done it, you know what it is, even if you do not fully understand the captions of a pornographic book written in ancient greek. But please dont tell that to an econ grad student. They dont know what sex is. | ||
Strongly recommended This is not only a text book but also a very sourceful handbook of microeconomics. It is worth owning all your lifetime. Even one day when, we are old, we at least could see all we knew about the microeconomic world at that time. | ||
An Evaluation of the Game Theory Material This compendium of introductory graduate economic theory was written in 1995, yet is still the industry standard. The game theory portion of the book covers about 10% of the total 970-plus pages, and can be considered the "common culture" of economics graduate students operating in the neoclassical tradition. It appeared later than most of the popular game theory textbooks (including Fudenberg and Tirole, Kreps, and Myerson), but much foundational game theory was produced in the period from 1985 to 1995, and hence is not presented in this, or any other, textbook used in graduate courses. The result is that the current generation of young economists is reared on a rather Utopian and uncritical game theory catechism. The authors ask the right question: "What should we expect to observe in a game played by rational players who are fully knowledgeable about the structure of the game and each others' rationality?" (p. 235) They begin to answer this question correctly, relying on the concept of "rationalizability" developed in 1984 by Bernheim and Pearce (the reader should Google references in this review, as I will not provide the full bibliographical details). They correctly characterize rationalizable strategies as those that survive the iterated elimination of strongly dominated strategies, but they accept uncritically the conclusion that rationalizable strategies "can be said to be precisely the set of strategies that can be played by rational players..." (p. 243). This is highly misleading. On the one hand, we have Basu's Traveler's Dilemma game in which the only rationalizable strategy is virtually never played by real-life players, even game theorists. Moreover, there is a wide class of games of strategic complementarity, exemplified by Carlsson and van Damme's investment game, in which there is a unique rationalizability strategy which is also risk-dominant. This will be played by real players only when error rates are large, and this is not because there is some failure of rationality. The problem here is that the concept of common knowledge of rationality is in some way faulty. Exactly how is an open question at the moment. Rubinstein's Email Game is another example of a game with a unique but absurd rationalizable strategy. The authors move on from rationalizability to Nash equilibrium. I believe this is a theoretical error, since the next logical step is to assume common priors and common knowledge of rationality, which Aumann (1987) has shown renders Bayesian rationality equivalent to correlated equilibrium. As Aumann and other authors stress, correlated equilibrium is the "natural" equilibrium concept in classical game theory, not Nash equilibrium. The correlated equilibrium concept is also a bridge to a game-theoretic analysis of social institutions and "social epistemology." The book's defense of the Nash equilibrium concept is (justifiably) half-hearted, and does not include the strongest justification, from evolutionary game theory (there is no evolutionary anything in this book, much less evolutionary game theory). There is no satisfying justification of the Nash criterion in this book at all, in fact. However, the problems with Nash equilibrium are discussed only in passing, if at all. For instance, the authors never even try to defend the notion that a player will play a mixed strategy in a one-shot game! There are strong defenses of this notion by Harsanyi (the Purification Theorem) and Aumann (Nash conjectural equilibrium). These defense are themselves faulty, accepted by game theorists only because there is nothing better. But, the authors could have broached the subject. The book makes a half-hearted attempt to deal with the equilibrium refinement literature, and weakly defends perfection, subgame perfection, and sequentiality. Most economists have learned in graduate school that rationality implies backward induction (subgame perfection) even though there is no justification for this view in the primary literature. The authors do little to dispel this notion, although they do present the Centipede Game as an example where backward induction may not be justified. In fact, backward induction can rarely be justified on rationality (or any other) grounds in games where players move two or more times along the equilibrium path of play, except in special circumstances. In sum, the treatment of game theory is competent but limited, and not intellectually exciting, because the authors do not convey the deep challenges that the commitment to explaining strategic behavior on the basis of Bayesian rationality presents to the game theorist. The problematic status of game theory in its current instantiation are thereby glossed over, so that the deep epistemological problems recognized by professional game theorists are not reflected in the use of game theory by applied practitioners. | ||