Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason

Current courses

Incentive-Centered Design: Contracting and Signaling (SI 680)

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Information Economics (SI 646)

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Information in Social Systems: Collections, Flows, and Processing (SI 500)

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Previous courses

Advanced Information Economics (SI 731)

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Agent Systems Design Lab (SI 612)

This graduate lab at the School of Information is intended to continue building upon the experience of the earlier SI 609 Foundations course (see below). The lab participants seek to design, implement and evaluate a working agent-based online repository for scholarly preprints in the information sciences and related fields.

Antitrust Economics (ECON 632)

Course syllabus

A doctoral course on economics in competition policy and enforcement. To learn some economic theory applicable to antitrust issues. To learn to apply economic theory to the facts of real antitrust and merger cases.

Choice and Learning (SI 502)

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Competitive Strategy and Policy in the Information Industries (SI 660)

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Financial Management and Analysis (SPP 741)

This is a graduate course in the School of Public Policy. We will learn a few methods of measuring, managing and analyzing public resources. The secondary goal (which will no doubt often seem like the only objective) will be to work "the numbers". Even if you never have to crunch numbers directly in your future jobs, you will be a user of numbers generated by others. To learn how to read, interpret and use those numbers requires an up-close-and-personal experience with how they are put together.

Foundations (SI 609)

This experimental graduate course at the School of Information grew out of a need to develop an integrated understanding of information, human systems and technology. First offered in the 1996 Fall term, the course was taught by an interdisciplinary group of faculty who endeavour to explore the synergies between information theory, computation, cognitive psychology, economics, and organizational theory.

Information Economics (ECON 755)

Course syllabus

This is a course on various microeconomic theories of information. In particular, we will study information transportation in networks, information content, and markets for information. In the final unit we will study the use of information and computation systems to implement markets, and some issues in information and complexity. Questions about the economics of information are not new, but most of the research we will read is quite recent. The course design is motivated by the vast number of new problems, or new combinations of old problems, that have followed from two major trends. These trends are the exponentially falling costs of digital computation and communications. As a consequence, organizing, searching, retrieving, and delivering information has become astonishingly inexpensive. As a crude shorthand, we sometimes say that digital information can be duplicated at zero marginal cost, with perfect fidelity (no quality loss), and distributed at zero cost. When something even approximating these conditions occurs, unusual economic phenomena arise.

Information Economics (SI 746)

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Information Networks Economics (ECON 495)

This is an undergraduate honors seminar offered by the Department of Economics. The course centers on the economic issues surrounding the development of an information network infrastructure, with a particular focus on the emergence of integrated services, broadband public switched networks.

Information Networks Policy (SPP 744)

This is a graduate course offered by the School of Public Policy. Class participants study the development of modern information networks (integrated services, broadband public switched networks), and examine questions of how networks develop, the role of government and regulation, user access, subsidies, and allocation of network resources.

Information Policy Seminar (SI 760)

A graduate course in which we study current policy issues related to the development of modern information networks and digital information production and distribution.

(The online materials were originally designed for a proprietary software server and don't function perfectly. You may wish to refer directly to the course Introduction, the Schedule and the Readings, which are the most important of these files.)

Microeconomics for Information Professionals (SI 625)

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Ph.D. Student Seminar (SI PhD)

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Research Seminar in Industrial Organization (ECON 731/732)

Course schedule

A graduate research workshop in industrial organization (market structure, strategy, performance).