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Rakesh V. Vohra offers a unique approach to studying and understanding intermediate microeconomics by reversing the conventional order of treatment, starting with topics that are mathematically simpler and progressing to the more complex. The book begins with monopoly, which requires single variable rather than multivariable calculus and allows students to focus clearly on the fundamental trade-off at the heart of economics: margin versus volume. Imperfect competition and the contrast with monopoly follows, introducing the notion of Nash equilibrium. Perfect competition is addressed toward the end of the book, and framed as a model of non-strategic behavior by firms and agents. The last chapter is devoted to externalities, with an emphasis on how one might design competitive markets to price externalities and linking the difficulties to the problem of efficient provision of public goods. Real-life examples engage the reader while encouraging them to think critically about the interplay between model and reality.

"Pricing drives three of the most important elements of firm success: revenue and profits, customer behavior and firm image. This book provides an introduction to the basic principles for thinking clearly about pricing. Unlike other marketing books on pricing, the authors use a more analytic approach and relate ideas to the basic principles of microeconomics. Rakesh Vohra and Lakshman Krishnamurthi also cover three areas in greater depth and provide more insight than may be gleaned from existing books: 1) the use of auctions, 2) price discrimination and 3) pricing in a competitive environment"--

"Mechanism design is an analytical framework for thinking clearly and carefully about what exactly a given institution can achieve when the information necessary to make decisions is dispersed and privately held. This analysis provides an account of the underlying mathematics of mechanism design based on linear programming. Three advantages characterize the approach. The first is simplicity: arguments based on linear programming are both elementary and transparent. The second is unity: the machinery of linear programming provides a way to unify results from disparate areas of mechanism design. The third is reach: the technique offers the ability to solve problems that appear to be beyond solutions offered by traditional methods. No claim is made that the approach advocated should supplant traditional mathematical machinery. Rather, the approach represents an addition to the tools of the economic theorist who proposes to understand economic phenomena through the lens of mechanism design"--

The National Resident Matching program seeks a stable matching of medical students to teaching hospitals. With couples, stable matchings need not exist. Nevertheless, for any student preferences, we show that each instance of a matching problem has a "nearby" instance with a stable matching. The nearby instance is obtained by perturbing the capacities of the hospitals. In this perturbation, aggregate capacity is never reduced and can increase by at most four. The capacity of each hospital never changes by more than two. (JEL C78, D47, I11, J41, J44)

Government procurement and allocation programs often use subsidies and setasides favoring small businesses and other target groups to address fairness concerns. These concerns are in addition to standard objectives such as efficiency and revenue. We study the design of the optimal mechanism for a seller concerned with efficiency, subject to a constraint to favor a target group. In our model, buyers' private values are determined by costly pre-auction investment. If the constraint is distributional, i.e. to guarantee that the target group wins sufficiently often, then the constrained efficient mechanism is a flat subsidy. This is consistent with findings in the empirical literature. In contrast, if the constraint is to ensure a certain investment level by the target group, the optimal mechanism is a type dependent subsidy. In this case a set aside may be better than a flat or percentage subsidy.