ECON3123: Organisational Economics

4x10% Problem Sets. Two or three problems that are a bit more difficult than what was shown in tutorials or lectures.

60% Final Exam. Similar structure to the problem sets. Three questions with multiple parts. Some with calculations, and some asking you to verbally explain the underlying contract structure.

ECON2101 or ECON2112. I'd recommend taking both before this course.

This is course should really be called Contract Theory. We spent all of our time investigating interactions between principals and agents (essentially just employers and employees) under different circumstances. Principals will have one set of desired outcomes (maximise profits), and agents have another, often conflicting, set of desired outcomes (maximise pay). The fun of this course comes in playing around the different times that the principals and agents make moves, how the principal pays the agent, and how the agent produces the good. I found the weeks spent on Asset Ownership and Career Incentives to be particularly interesting because of how fun it was to keep track of all the different variables and timings that were introduced.

There are a couple of weeks in the middle that I thought were a bit of a slog - the lectures on Performance Evaluation, Teamwork, Incentives, and Authority. They each took me a while to understand the underlying interaction, but I can't say that I'm very comfortable with them.

Overall, this is a pretty fun course. I wouldn't recommend that you take this over courses like ECON3106 or ECON3121 though.
Aaaand that's it for my undergrad degree! It's been a great ride for the last four years at UNSW, even with the chaos of 2020 and 2021. I hope that my course reviews have been comprehensible and useful for everyone who has read them. I might be doing econ honours next year, so keep an eye out for a review on that at the end of next year if I'm not burnt out at the end. Thanks everyone!

2 x 1.5 hour lecture per week. 1 x 1.5 hour tutorial per week.

4/5.

Full lecture recordings on hand.

Hongyi Li, 3.5/5. This might not be a fair score for Hongyi since I had Gabriele, Federico, and Gautam last term for other third-year micro courses - I'm a bit spoiled! I've had friends say they he was one of their favourite lecturers. I enjoyed his lectures, and his notes were very comprehensive.

Full slides provided.

3/5.

2021/T3

75 DN