Focusing on foundational material, this textbook offers a deep dive into modern microeconomic theory, particularly for first-year graduate students. It highlights the significance of noncooperative game theory as a key tool for modeling economic phenomena, covering diverse topics such as agency theory, market signaling, and mechanism design. Emphasizing the importance of aligning theory with economic intuition, it also includes extensive appendices on game theory concepts and provides free online resources, enhancing the learning experience.
The book critiques the pervasive business and social information systems by examining their foundations in positivism, individualism, and market-fundamentalist economics. It argues that these philosophies are fundamentally at odds with nature, challenging their validity. Additionally, it explores alternative philosophical perspectives that oppose this dominant trio, offering a thought-provoking analysis of how these systems shape contemporary life and their implications for society and the environment.
"In The Motivation Toolkit, economist and management expert David Kreps offers a variety of tools, drawn from the disciplines of economics and social psychology, that you can adapt to your specific situation to achieve better motivation. This starts with understanding both the economic and social relationship your employees have with their work, their jobs, and your organization, then using that understanding to find economic or psychological motivators that will work."--Amazon.
Developed over a ten year period at the Stanford Business School, this textbook underscores the connections between microeconomics and business. Its full-length, integrated case studies reveal how economic models can yield answers to practical problems.
Human Resources are the most important resource that a firm commands and should be regarded as capital, a factor of production in which managers invest today in order to realize future profits.
This book examines why game theory has become such a popular tool of analysis. It investigates the deficiencies in this methodology and goes on to consider whether its popularity will fade or remain an important tool for economists. The book provides the reader with some basic concepts from noncooperative theory, and then goes on to explore the strengths, weaknesses, and future of the theory as a tool of economic modelling and analysis. All those interested in the applications of game theory to economics, from undergraduates to academics will find this study of particular value.
David M. Kreps has developed a text in microeconomics that is both challenging and "user-friendly." The work is designed for the first-year graduate microeconomic theory course and is accessible to advanced undergraduates as well. Placing unusual emphasis on modern noncooperative game theory, it provides the student and instructor with a unified treatment of modern microeconomic theory--one that stresses the behavior of the individual actor (consumer or firm) in various institutional settings. The author has taken special pains to explore the fundamental assumptions of the theories and techniques studied, pointing out both strengths and weaknesses.The book begins with an exposition of the standard models of choice and the market, with extra attention paid to choice under uncertainty and dynamic choice. General and partial equilibrium approaches are blended, so that the student sees these approaches as points along a continuum. The work then turns to more modern developments. Readers are introduced to noncooperative game theory and shown how to model games and determine solution concepts. Models with incomplete information, the folk theorem and reputation, and bilateral bargaining are covered in depth. Information economics is explored next. A closing discussion concerns firms as organizations and gives readers a taste of transaction-cost economics.
