Ben Hermalin’s Teaching Materials

11 December 2007 at 3:33 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Many years ago I had the pleasure of taking Ben Hermalin’s class on mechanism design and agency theory. In those days (around 1990) Ben was a baby-faced assistant professor (now a baby-faced chaired professor), just arrived from MIT where, according to rumor, he had single-handedly proofread — and therefore solved — all the exercises in Tirole’s Theory of Industrial Organization. Naturally, this gave him a certain aura among the PhD students. I also recall that, during Ben’s first year at Berkeley, George Akerlof audited his mechanism design course, leading Ben to joke that he would always remember Akerlof as one of his brightest students.

I happened to be on Ben’s website today and discovered that he’s posted a set of lecture notes (see the bottom of this page) from his PhD theory courses. See, in particular, his notes from Economics 201B, the second course in the first-year micro theory sequence. Very useful material for economics PhD students (and their instructors).

Also worth a read is this entry on contract law by Hermalin, Avery Katz, and Richard Craswell (in the new Handbook of Law and Economics, not to be confused with the earlier Encyclopedia of Law and Economics). Check it out.