Information

Lectures:

Course	Days	Times			Location
CSc 84020	T	11.45am	-	1.45pm	5382

Description:

This is a seminar course on Ecommerce and Computational Economics.

We will deal mainly with auctions, which are the main kind of electronic market currently used for Ecommerce, and look at both the economic theory of auctions the various kinds of computational systems that people have implemented around the use of auctions (including trading systems, artificial economies and the like).

The course will involve every participant making a presentation of a paper to do with this topic.

Textbook:

There is no textbook as such, but the following books are good background for those who are interested.

The first is pretty light reading (and gets extra points for the (deliberate) misquote of E. M. Forster "two cheers for markets" on the final page). The second is more heavyweight, quite technical, and gives a lot of the general economic background to the work we will be looking at.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan, W. W. Norton & Company.

Auctions: Theory and Practice (The Toulouse Lectures in Economics) by Paul Klemperer, Princeton University Press.