14.271  Industrial Organization I

Hello all --

Welcome to 14.271! Here are a few items of business:

1) Recitations: Recitations will be on Fridays from 10:30-12:00 in the same room as the lectures (E51-361). This Friday (September 10) will be the first recitation. For those of you who are new to MIT, most classes have two 1.5 hour lectures by the professor during the week and then one 1.5 hour session by the TA. During recitation we may review material from class, cover some additional material, go over questions about the homework, or discuss any other topic you have questions about. Throughout the semester, if you have suggestions of topics you would like to see reviewed, try to email me at least the day before the recitation so I can plan for it.

Also, each week I will send out an email before the recitation to let you all know what we will plan to cover.

2) Office hours: Office hours are different from recitation. This is a time when you can stop by to ask any questions you have, but I won't be preparing a particular topic to present to the whole class (I am clarifying because I was a bit confused when I first came to MIT; at my undergrad university office hours were synonymous with recitation). If you can email me your questions before stopping by that would be helpful so I can be better prepared to help (or I may be able to answer the questions by email).

For now, I will tentatively plan on holding office hours on Tuesdays from 2:30-4 pm. I chose Tuesday because it looks like some problem sets will be due on Wednesdays, and because that time slot appears to conflict with fewer other classes (but it does conflict with Time Series (14.384) and Political Economy (14.781)). If that time doesn't work for you and you would like to meet with me some other time, just send me an email and we can arrange a time to meet.

3) Stellar: The class website is on MIT's course website system, Stellar, located here: https://stellar.mit.edu/S/ course/14/fa10/14.271/. For those of you who are not MIT students, I believe you will need to set up a collaboration account to be able to access the website. Instructions for doing so are found here.

4) IO lunch and seminar: The MIT IO lunch (called "lunch" for historic reasons: at one point food was served) is held on most Mondays from 12-1 pm in E52-232. The IO lunch is an opportunity for fellow students and sometimes visiting faculty to present on IO topics. If you would like to be added to the IO lunch list, send me an email to let me know, or just add yourself using https://groups.mit.edu/webmoira/ (the name of the email list is "io_lunch"). Also, if you are interested in presenting at the IO lunch, let me know. There are still various Mondays available this semester, and students are encouraged to present even if the research is still a bit rough.

The IO seminar is held on Mondays from 2:30-4:00 pm in E62-650 and is where professors or job market candidates present IO research. The research presented at the seminar is much more fine-tuned than that presented at the lunch.

The IO lunch schedule is still being determined, but I will post the IO seminar schedule on Stellar.

5) Homework due dates: I will let you know as soon as we have these determined.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Brad