I was doing some work today, catching up on some reading about social choice functions.  Most of the literature was written by Kenneth Arrow, for which he won a Nobel Prize (among other work on general equilibrium).  On his wikipedia page, I stumbed up on this 2009 paper Some Developments in Economic Theory since 1940.

Anyone who has taken a PhD-level micro course should read this text. It provides a concise guide to the development of modern thinking about game theory, general equilibrium theory, and mathematical economics along with a pleasantly written autobiography of Dr. Arrow.  I recommend.

Just a few quick notes about the blog.  First, I added recaptcha to the blog. Hopefully, this will allow me to have comments without getting bombarded with spam. I’m amazed at the amount of automated spam scripts that hit wordpress blogs.  Second, there was another bug that wasn’t letting people add comments altogether. This should also be corrected. Finally, I did receive an email in response to my below post on Hans Werner-Gottinger, which should have been posted in the comments. It is from a faculty member at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin:

Yes, this guy appears to have been quite a serial plagiarist. The book
you mention is not one of the 13 plagiarisms that have been identified
to date, but that does not mean that it is original. One should be very
careful when using materials from people who have been identified as
plagiarists one, and even more so for people who plagiarize more than once.

I don’t really think you can get $150 for the book

If you should find a source for this book, I would be happy to hear of
it. I’ve included a comment at Amazon.

Regards,
–
Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff

So, if any of my readers stumble upon other potential plagiarisms from Gottinger, Professor Weber-Wulff is the one to contact.  In the meantime, I’ll just hold on to this book and at least use it’s citations to direct me to other resources.

I logged onto librarything.com today to add a couple of books to my online library when I noticed a message about a book I own, Economies of Network Industries, from another user that read:

“Economies of Network Industries by Hans Gottinger – i think this guy was uncovered as a fraud last year, but great visual explanations nonetheless.  netonomics. i was particularly interested in it during undergrad but i deemed it had no future. prospects for you look good? how do you apply it?”

I used this book in an independent study I did in my undergraduate days (pre 2007) and had no clue this guy was a fraud! More interestingly, I did some googling to find out more and stumbled upon this article in Research Policy.  Gottinger was a serial plagiarist and even more, he was claiming to be from a Dutch University department that didn’t even exist!  Subsequently, Nature published an interesting article on who this guy is.  Even after reading the article, I still don’t quite understand who he was. Did he plagiarize everything or just some things? What works are his originals? Is this textbook his original work or was it copied too?

So, what do I do with this book? I could sell it on Amazon for $150.00 (it’s listed at that price, I don’t know if there are buyers).  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use it or cite any of the empirical data in it since this guy is a fraud.  What is the academic protocol for this kind of thing?

Now that the semester is over and I’ve barely scratched my way through, I’m going to point out some helpful books that other may find useful. I suggest reading these *before* you start an economics PhD program and doing the exercises in the books.

Mathematics for Economists by C. Simon. This was by far, the most useful book available. It provided excellent summaries and explanations for tough topics, such as convexity/concavity, quasi convexity, homogeneity, and linear algebra. It provides some in depth coverage of calculus techniques but I found those to be rather unhelpful. The calculus in the Yamane book below was much better. It’s kind of an expensive book, so I recommend getting this in advance from the library.

A First Course in Optimization Theory by R. Sundaram. This is a tremendously well-written book. In fact, for a tough topic, like optimization theory Sundaram does a really great job. He covers Lagrange, Kuhn-Tucker, Supermodularity, and basic convex optimization. This is stuff that comes up repeatedly in intro PhD micro, so it’s mandatory reading.

Mathematics for Economists by T. Yamane. I got this book from the library because it looked helpful and it is a very helpful book, especially the coverage of calculus. The chapters on differentiation and integration are the highlight of the book. The only problem is that because this book is old, it’s a little bit *too easy*. However, you should go through this book, as a refresher before going onto the Simon or Sundaram texts.

Principals of Mathematical Analysis by W. Rudin. Everyone in economics talks about this book like it is the most helpful book ever written. I found this book to be “ok”. It does provide sufficient coverage of real analysis but goes way to fast and the exercises are not great.  Of course, I’m in the minority on this. Either way, the book is pretty cheap, so you should at least add it to your bookshelf.

One of the best things about being in academia: after a long night of studying until 1 or 2am, you can sleep in until 9am the next morning. The value of a decent night’s sleep cannot be beat. The next day, I feel refreshed and ready to pick up where I left off the previous night. Today is going to be a long day of meetings and classes, so I’m glad that I could sleep in and have my sanity together for today’s events. This is a good thing.

I only have a small amount of time before a talk at 11, so I’m going to use this second to talk about a concept in microeconomics that is particularly befuddling to a lot of students (including myself)./

All semester, I’ve been haunted by a concept in my micro-theory course that I just can’t wrap my brain around: convexity and concavity of functions. You learn this stuff in grade school, right? Like the definitions of convex and concave seem obvious. I always think of the grade school example: lenses.  However, take this concept to the world of analysis/economics and it becomes cloudy and confusing, especially after adding in the concepts of *quasi* convexity and *quasi* concavity.  UToronto has one of the best tutorials on quasiconvexity and concavity.  I will have some updates coming soon, attempting to cover this topic as well.

So, of the three (now two) courses that I am registered for this semester, one of them is Microeconomic Theory – it’s the first course in the PhD economics sequence. I think almost every economics student, no matter what school they are at uses one of two textbooks for the course. The texts are either: Microeconomic Theory (otherwise known as “Mas-Colell”) or Microeconomic Analysis by Hal Varian.  At Northwestern, we use a combination of the two texts but mostly work out of the dreaded “Mas-Colell”.  I was talking to a friend at Michigan, he informed me that they strictly used Varian until last year, now they use Mas-Colell too.

As as aside, anytime that Amazon lists a one of the key phrases from your text as “Mathematical Appendix” – you know you’re in for a fun ride.

Monday is the big micro midterm. So, over the past 24 hours, I’ve been living, eating, and breathing micro theory.  The elementary micro stuff is terrifying: choice theory, utility function constructions, expenditure minimization, utility maximization, and so on.  In order to get to what I’m really interested in: information economics, mechanism design, networks, etc, I have to pay my dues to “Mas-Colell”.  I’m not completely sure that I will even pass this course – I simply don’t have enough formal math background to construct the proofs to the level of quality they expect.   I’m giving it everything I have so at least if I fail, I’ll get as much information out of it as possible.  I’ll eventually catch up with the math, just not sure when…

Fortunately, it sounds like I’ll have far more scheduling flexibility next semester (taking linear programming this semester was a bad idea, I had to drop it). I think I am going to take one class in each department: communications, economics, and computer science.  I think this load may be more reasonable than what I am doing this semester.