IM 7011: Information Economics, Fall 2014

Instructor: Ling-Chieh Kung
Department of Information Management
National Taiwan University

Note. For this course, I plan to adopt the "flipped classroom" principle, which may be new to some students. Moreover, this course focuses on "information," just just "the information industry." Please pay attention to the syllabus to get an idea about the design of this course.

In the field of Information Economics (or Economics of Information), people use economic tools to study the value and impact of information. Information is not only important in the information industry; it has critical impacts in almost all business activities. In this course, we will study how to apply economic modeling to rigorously analyze information-related issues, especially information asymmetry. Applications that we will study lie in marketing, supply chain management, information systems, among others. Students will be required to read some academic papers and conduct some case studies. Due to the nature of this field, this course cannot be taught without economic theories. To comfortably take this course, one needs to know basic ideas about calculus, optimization, and probability.

This is an elective course offered in the Department of Information Management in National Taiwan University. The target "customers" of this course are graduate and senior students, though junior students may still enroll in this course. In most cases, all students who want to enroll in or audit this course are welcome.

A description (in Chinese) of this course can be found here (the instructor's personal blog).

Basic information

Instructor
  • Ling-Chieh Kung (¤Õ¥O³Ç).
  • E-mail: lckung(AT)ntu.edu.tw.
  • Office: Room 413, Management Building II.
  • Tel: 02-3366-1176.
  • Office hour: 10:30am-noon, Thursday.
Teaching assistant
  • Jack Chen (³¯¹Å»¨), E-mail: r02725018(AT)ntu.edu.tw.
Lectures
  • 9:10am-12:10pm, Monday.
  • Room 204, Management Building II.
Prerequisites
  • Students need to know the basic ideas of calculus, optimization, and probability.
  • Some knowledge about game theory will be helpful.
On-line resources
  • To check grades: CEIBA.
  • To download or link to materials: This website.
  • To discuss: the bulletin board "NTUIM-lckung" on PTT.

Syllabus

For a detailed description about this course, including course policies, grading rules, references, etc., please see the syllabus. Whenever there is an update, a new version will be posted with a short note describing the update.

Posted on Syllabus Notes
2014/9/15 Link The basic planning of this course

Course outline

There are four modules in this course: decentralization and inefficiency, the screening theory, the signaling theory, and final project presentations. The course starts with discussions about the incentive issues in decentralized systems. We then spend most of our time studying the economics of information to understand the impacts of possessing information or being lack of information. The focus will be on adverse selection, one of the most well studied types of information asymmetry in the field of economics. We will discuss how one may screen others' private information and signal its own private information. Finally, students' final project presentations conclude this course.

Schedule

Week Lecture Date Materials Videos Topics
1 2014/9/15 Slides N/A Overview, quiz, and review of optimization
2 2014/9/22 Slides Playlist Introduction to game theory
3 2014/9/29 Slides Playlist Channel selection under competition
4 2014/10/6* Slides Playlist (No class: the instructor is doing military service)
5 2014/10/13 Slides Playlist Channel coordination with returns
6 2014/10/20 Slides Playlist The screening theory
7 2014/10/27 Slides Playlist Incentives for retailer forecasting
8 2014/11/3 N/A N/A Case discussion (Netflix)
9 2014/11/10 N/A N/A Midterm exam
10 2014/11/17 Slides N/A Value of Information: the more, the better?
11 2014/11/24 Slides Playlist The signaling theory
12 2014/12/1 Slides Playlist Signaling Quality through Specialization
13 2014/12/8 N/A N/A Proposal discussions (Schedule)
14 2014/12/15 Template N/A Case discussion (Ford)
15 2014/12/22 N/A N/A Review
16 2014/12/29 N/A N/A Final exam
17 2015/1/5 N/A N/A Final project presentations (1)
18 2015/1/12 N/A N/A Final project presentations (2)

* The slides and videos were made for Operations Research, Fall 2014.

Case studies

Cases Release Date Due Date
Case 1 2014/9/29 2014/10/13
Case 2 2014/11/6 2014/11/24

Homework

Problems Release Date Due Date Solution
Homework 1 2014/9/15 2014/9/19 Solution 1
Homework 2 2014/10/15 2014/10/24 Solution 2
Homework 3 2014/11/4 2014/11/7 Solution 3
Homework 4 2014/12/22 2014/12/27 Solution 4

Exams

Problems Solution
Midterm N/A
Final N/A

Project