A graduate course in which we study current policy issues related to the development of modern information networks and digital information production and distribution.

(The online materials were originally designed for a proprietary software server and don't function perfectly. You may wish to refer directly to the course Introduction, the Schedule and the Readings, which are the most important of these files.)

ECON 731/32 Research Seminar in Industrial Organization

A graduate research workshop in industrial organization (market structure, strategy, performance).

ECON 632 Antitrust Economics

A doctoral course on economics in competition policy and enforcement. To learn some economic theory applicable to antitrust issues. To learn to apply economic theory to the facts of real antitrust and merger cases.

ECON 755 Information Economics

This is a course on various microeconomic theories of information. In particular, we will study information transportation in networks, information content, and markets for information. In the final unit we will study the use of information and computation systems to implement markets, and some issues in information and complexity. Questions about the economics of information are not new, but most of the research we will read is quite recent. The course design is motivated by the vast number of new problems, or new combinations of old problems, that have followed from two major trends. These trends are the exponentially falling costs of digital computation and communications. As a consequence, organizing, searching, retrieving, and delivering information has become astonishingly inexpensive. As a crude shorthand, we sometimes say that digital information can be duplicated at zero marginal cost, with perfect fidelity (no quality loss), and distributed at zero cost. When something even approximating these conditions occurs, unusual economic phenomena arise.

SI 502 Choice and Learning

This is one of the new required Foundations courses in the School of Information's MSI curriculum. The course will provide a novel but rigorous graduate-level treatment of information's role in choice and learning, and of choice and learning about information. We will develop foundational principles for students planning to design, implement, manage or evaluate modern information systems, with a focus on the interaction between technology, user needs and capabilities, and various notions of information. The course will draw heavily from the referent disciplines of cognitive psychology and micro-economics, but in an integrated framework for understanding and analysis.

SI 612 Agent Systems Design Lab

This graduate lab at the School of Information is intended to continue building upon the experience of the earlier SI 609 Foundations course (see below). The lab participants seek to design, implement and evaluate a working agent-based online repository for scholarly preprints in the information sciences and related fields.

SI 609 Foundations

This experimental graduate course at the School of Information grew out of a need to develop an integrated understanding of information, human systems and technology. First offered in the 1996 Fall term, the course is taught by an interdisciplinary group of faculty who endeavour to explore the synergies between information theory, computation, cognitive psychology, economics, and organizational theory.

SPP 744 Information Networks Policy

This is a graduate course offered by the School of Public Policy. Class participants study the development of modern information networks (integrated services, broadband public switched networks), and examine questions of how networks develop, the role of government and regulation, user access, subsidies, and allocation of network resources.

ECON 495 Information Networks Economics

This is an undergraduate honors seminar offered by the Department of Economics. The course centers on the economic issues surrounding the development of an information network infrastructure, with a particular focus on the emergence of integrated services, broadband public switched networks.

SPP 741 Financial Management and Analysis

This is a graduate course in the School of Public Policy. We will learn a few methods of measuring, managing and analyzing public resources. The secondary goal (which will no doubt often seem like the only objective) will be to work "the numbers". Even if you never have to crunch numbers directly in your future jobs, you will be a user of numbers generated by others. To learn how to read, interpret and use those numbers requires an up-close-and-personal experience with how they are put together.