ECON 504 Microeconomic Theory II

Game theory is the engine here: how rational agents choose when their payoffs depend on what everyone else chooses, and what "rational" even means once beliefs about beliefs enter the picture. You'll spend the semester formalizing strategic situations as normal-form and extensive-form games, proving existence of equilibria, and working through the canonical models, Rubinstein bargaining, Spence signalling, Akerlof's lemons, Myerson's optimal auction, mostly on problem sets with a single quiz to keep you honest. It's the second half of the PhD-level micro sequence, so it assumes you're comfortable with fixed-point arguments and measure-theoretic probability, and it's the foundation everything downstream (contract theory, IO, political economy, market design) builds on.