A Course in Microeconomic Theory PDF 1990

A Course in Micro-  economic Theory (Click here to view our web site description.) David M. Kreps...

A Course in Micro-  economic Theory (Click here to view our web site description.) David M. Kreps T he late s witnessed the beginning of a rev- olution in microeconomic theory. Economists incor- porated game theory into their standard framework and extended microeco- nomics into a host of non- standard topics. Kreps’s Course in Microeconomic Theory encompassed all of this revolution’s excite- ment and wide-ranging possibilities. Moreover, the book sparked the major revival of Princeton’s economics list. Divided into five parts, the book did not simply cover the well-established ground of traditional microeconomic theory— utility-maximizing actors, profit-maximizing firms, and the price mechanism that joins them—but also applied a more ambitious definition to the entire project of microeconomic theory, arguing that it should encompass “the behavior of individual economic actors and the aggregation of their actions in different institu- tional frameworks.” Such a grand definition meant that the book was less about the solid ground of tradition and more about the blue sky of the horizon. The book showed its newfangled stripes beginning with part , “Noncooperative Game Theory,” demon- strating how game theory has come to dominate contemporary microeconomic theory. Parts  and  were equally groundbreak- ing, addressing questions of information economics and transac- tion cost economics, respectively. Kreps concluded his introduction by noting, “All this is, pre- sumably, a bit hard to fathom without a lot of fleshing out. But that’s the point of the next eight-hundred-odd pages.” That’s the point, too, of the past fifteen years: fleshing out the path set by A Course in Microeconomic Theory. 