0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent price and delivery time, 2008-09-13
I got it with an excellent price (down from the level I had seen it a couple of weeks ago) and it arrived very fast.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Classic IO Graduate Textbook, 2007-03-16
Tirole's book remains a classic IO reference for graduate-level IO courses even though it was published in 1988. The strength of the book is in its style of exposition - crisp mathematical models written in a style that is commonly found in journal articles. Therefore, reading the book prepares oneself for reading theoretical IO journal or working papers. This also implies that appreciation of the book requires that the reader is comfortable with mathematics and has some patience in working out the models (intermediate steps are sometimes omitted). However, those who persevere will reap the benefits.
0 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
very fast delivery, 2007-01-09
I received the book in a few days eventhough I had selected the standard shipping option. The book was packaged well and etc.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
An organized introduction to industrial organization, 2001-06-15
This book covers the main subjects in this field, with very clear and readable expositions and solid formalizations. Mathematics is not difficult (basic notions of calculus and optimization are required) and some exercises have been included at the end of the chapters "...to help the reader become familiar with the subjects and to broaden his or her knowledge..."A bonus track: the book is also an excellent bibliographical guide to those who want to expand their reading.
38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
Very good book, but not for everyone, 2001-01-13
This book is absolutely the "classic" in IO. The author amazingly provided very clear and coherent exposition to this huge, but diverse field. But, this book is not for everyone as some reviews below implied. First, consultants or managers may not find this book useful for the real-life application, because this is a (rather serious) "theory" book. It has no detailed cases, no practical managerial implications, and so on. For that purpose, there are many other good books like Schere, or Carlton & Perloff, etc. The virtue of this book lies in the author's capability to make accessible otherwise very complicated and abstruse models, which would be mainly the concern of grad students in econ, not consultants. Therefore, econ students who are interested in theory development in IO would quickly grasp the essence of important IO models with a simple algebra. I don't understand what part of the book some people think is useful as a reference for the consultants or even everyone.
Second, simple algebra in the book does not mean it is accessible to "everyone." At the introductory grad level, game thoery and information economics use only basic algebra, but it is still not easy at all. Of course, this book introduces almost all important topics usually taught in the first-year micro sequence at graduate school, like repeated game (Ch 6), basic mechanism design technique (non-linear pricing in Ch 3), principal-agent problem (Ch 1), and so on. It would be misleading if one says these topics are accessible to everyone because of "minimal use of math." Even chapter 1, the theory of firm, is a very deep discussion, introducing the concept of "incomplete contract."
In my opinion, this book will be ideal for econ grad students, who would want to quickly review relevant chapters before moving into more recent IO literature (of course, now with full rigor).