USEM 180
Games, Behavior and Economics
Old Cabell 242
Professor Edwin T.
Burton
Virginia National Bank Building
2nd Floor
212 731-2340
(etb6d@virginia.edu)
Office Hours:
Tues/Thurs 11-12 AM
Reading Assignments: (read Money Ball as soon as possible)
Week of August 24th - 29th: Dixit and Nalebuff, Part I, pages 1 - 86
Week of September 1st - September 5th, Dixit and Nalebuff, Chapter 7 "Unpredictability"
Week of September 8th - September 12th, Nudge, pages 1-30
Week of September 15th - September 19th, Discussion of the Current Financial Crisis
Week of September 22nd - September 26th, Nudge, pages 1-71
Students may be admitted to this course
only by directly applying for entrance to Professor Burton. Please send an
email with resume to etb6d@virginia.edu to apply for admission.
The course is
open only to 1st years, but it is open to all students in the University
regardless of major or School.
This course meets once each week for two
hours on Friday from 9 AM until 10:50 AM.
If you are the kind of student who likes to sleep late, do not enroll in
this course. Attendance is mandatory.
Each week, we will take a game situation
or a problem in behavioral economics and consider it in detail. The only requirement for this course is a
paper of length 5 to 10 pages on a topic related to the material covered in the
course. The paper will be due at the end
of the semester. There will be no final
examination other than the paper.
The following books are required reading
for this course:
Thinking Strategically, by Avinash
Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Norton 1991
Money
Ball, by Michael Lewis
Nudge: Improving Decisions, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Yale University Press, 2008