I go through the analytics records for this website from time-to-time just to see how people get to my site or what search terms are popular.  Today, while going through, I found I’m getting hits for:

1- “How Tough is Mas-Colell”. Answer: Tough but feasible.  See my previous post on the standard microeconomics textbook for PhD students.

2- “Fantasy Football Linear Programming”. This one is interesting. I run a mailing list (that has no activity), where people can talk about fantasy football analysis techniques.  However, nobody on the mailing list has used linear programming (to the best of my knowledge). I wonder – are people using linear programming to determine a fantasy football roster? If so – awesome.

For those of you who don’t know – linear programming is a technique in optimization. In words, it is something like this: You have something that you need to maximize (or minimize), like profits for a company or points for your fantasy football team. You have a set of “constraints” – i.e. limitations on this maximization. Things like, for a company, you can only produce a limited quantity of some good or producing one good decreases the production of another good, and so on. I’m not sure how this would go back to fantasy football, though – like what would this constraints look like?

My best simple formulation of a linear program for fantasy football is something like this:

Maximize Potential Points!

Subject to:

• Limited number of positions (i.e. only 2 quarterbacks)
• Players are taken by other teams in the draft.
• Different Bye Weeks. (i.e. you don’t want all players with the same bye week, usually)
• Potential injuries and/or players with chronic injuries (I’m looking at you, Clinton Portis)

Perhaps there might be a way to develop some optimization technique that uses linear programming. The formulation of this program is feasible – but I’m not sure about:

• Computational limitations. The calculations for this optimization may be unreasonable – i.e. this may be an “NP Hard” problem.  I’m not sure about the complexity, yet.
• Points calculations. This is what I’ve been mostly working on the past two years – developing a good prediction algorithm that can account for variation in performance. I’m up to about 50% but this needs to be improved.

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.