Class 01 | Advanced Microeconomics | Duncan Foley

Advanced Microeconomics: Information and Behavior in Political Economy | Duncan Foley | Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research (http://www.newschool.edu/nssr) | Lecture 01 Introduction | Spring 2016 Class 01 Preliminaries. The first lecture consists of technical topics essential to the rest of the course, including philosophy of social science, Bayesian and Information theory. At the beginning of the course, the philosophy of social science in correspondence to its deviation from the natural science is debated, focusing on if science should address people in a different way than animals. Moreover, the subjects of the meaning of frequency and probability are examined. Afterwards, an overview of the Bayesian Theory is discussed, complementary to its limitations reaching reality and how this view is linked to the econometric theory, which is based on the former. The first lecture ends raising the topic of elementary information theory (Shannon’s entropy) within a historical framework.