EC 319 Mathematical Economics
Syllabus for Michaelmas Term 2005
Dr Ronny Razin

Course Description

 

This course aims to provide students with an in-depth
understanding of the techniques used in constrained optimisation problems
and to ensure that students can apply these techniques to a wide range of
economic problems. By the end of the course students should fully
comprehend the Lagrange and Kuhn-Tucker theorems, be able to work with
abstract logical arguments and master the applications of these ways of
reasoning to problems such as choice under uncertainty.

 

Textbooks and Course Material

 

A reccomended book for the course (covering some of the material in the course) is Further Mathematics for Economic Analysis, Knut Sydsaeter, Peter Hammond, Atle Seierstad, Arne Strom. Other material will be provided on the course web site.

 

Lecture Plan

 

Lecture 1: Introduction, the Constrained Optimisation problem.
Lecture 2: The Lagrange Sufficiency Theorem
Lecture 3: Concavity and Convexity, Lagrange Necessity Theorem
Lecture 4: Differentiability and Quadratic Forms
Lecture 5: Testing for Concavity and Unconstrained Optimisation
Lecture 6: The Kuhn-Tucker Theorem
Lecture 7: Solving Examples
Lecture 8: Maximum Value Functions and the Envelope Theorem
Lecture 9: Inter-temporal Constrained Optimisation
Lecture 10: Introduction to fixed point theorems

 

Problem sets

 

PS1

Other information

Dr Razin's office hours: Tuesday, 14:00 to 15:00 in S480 (St. Clements building).

Class teachers: Jochen Mankart - J.Mankart@lse.ac.uk and and Ander Perez-A.Perez1@lse.ac.uk.