The annual Summer/Winter School, a key project in Australian Research Council (ARC)’s Economic Design Network (EDN), for 2008 will consist of two mini-courses on Money and Pricing, which will be taught, respectively, by Professors Randall Wright (University of Pennsylvania) and R. Preston McAfee (CalTech, Yahoo).

The Summer/Winter school is primarily intended for graduate students, preferably having completed some graduate coursework, but will be of interest to all members of the academic community, including practioners in government and at the Reserve Bank of Australia, interested in the theory of money and pricing. There will also be three student presentations per day.

Professor McAfee's lectures will focus on pricing. Topics include monopoly pricing, price discrimination, peak-load pricing, matching problems, dynamic pricing, price dispersion, experience goods, the Coase conjecture, and auction theory. The emphasis will be on the common framework that binds these topics together, contrasting results, and on choosing which framework to use in different modelling environments.

Professor Wright's lectures will focus on monetary theory in a frictional environment. Topics will include the foundations of money as a medium of exchange, search and bargaining models of money and prices, the application of monetary theory to monetary data, and policy analysis. Emphasis will be placed on the development of an internally consistent theory of money, based on game theoretic microfoundations, and different pricing structures.

Participants may also be interested in attending the 3rd Annual Workshop on Macroeconomic Dynamics, which takes place at The University of Melbourne directly preceding the Winterschool: July 2-3. This workshop includes Professors Randall Wright and Steven Turnovsky (University of Washington) as plenary speakers.