Customer Reviews

The Economics of Uncertainty and Information

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This is really a great book: it is exhaustive and concise at the same time. Starting with the foundation of the theory of choice under uncertainty, it covers the topics of information structure, general equilibrium under uncertainty, and the typical asymmetric information topics: moral hazard and adverse selection. Given its completeness can be naturally used as a reference manual. And given the author's clarity of exposition can be also used as textbook.

I'm not entirely sure how to explain this book, as I didn't understand a word of it. I have also read "The Analytics of Information and Uncertainty", another book with heavy mathematical content, but one I found to be very good in scope and application. This text, however, seems to overuse mathematical methods. Economics is not about learning propositional mathematics, and just flicking through this book, there are models I already know, like the Edgeworth box diagram as applied to payoff states, and it was in a totally unrecognisable form! Even the fundamental theorems of welfare economics were garbled!

I would heartily recommend this text to anyone who has completed 2nd year university level mathematics courses, or is a university lecturer in Economics. If you're just an ordinary graduate with little interest in deep mathematical methods, there are better books out there.