Hal R. VarianCritiques

An interesting book...maybe even slightly visionary when it came out in 1998 but time has marched by in the information world and this book is looking rather dated. Though I remember that period and there was still a lot of people and organisations who were very slow to embrace the information age. I'm now ifn the position of having to downsize my library and this book is one of the casualties. Pity but I won't be re-reading it. I give it three stars.

For students

This is an absolute classic, and 10 years after publication still has relevant and critical information in each chapter. Perhaps a more up-to-date monograph for many topics would be Judo Strategy. However, the topics like Pricing, Standards Wars, Managing Lock-In are so relevant. Put this book together with The Innovator's Dilemma, Judo Strategy, and a few other tomes is enough to arm the new software entrepreneur. On the downside, the book is a little naive at times about the hardcore business and competitiveness of software, which is probably due to the authors being academics. An excellent strategy book, readable, and definitely specific to software.½

Brilliantly clear on the classic topics like the theory of the firm. Not, perhaps, so wonderful on game theory, mainly because the treatment is relatively superficial (especially compared to, e.g., Kreps). Also, I didn't find it great on the Arrow-DeBreu general equilibrium material, but that could have been because my reading of that material was fast.
Overall, a very nice text for first-semester PhD Micro.

The old joke was the "Invariance Principle" - if you needed to know anything crucial in microeconomic theory it was in Varian's text. The only problem was that Varian's exposition is so exact and terse that you needed to learn it elsewhere before you could understand it in Varian. Still a great text though.

The basic text on information business. Now it starts to be a bit old. There is a site www.inforules.com containing a lot of additional material

One of the best book on the new economy written by actual economists. Their emphasis is on online commerce and pricing strategies.

Varian's text is light hearted but very, very concise. If you know multivariable calculus, this will be easy. If not, then you're better off with Pindcyk and Rubinfield. The latter has nicer questions too.

I prefer Jehle and Reny. Varian is cool because it's concise and has funny remarks scattered throughout the book. It's written such that you can cross reference his intermediate text if you get lost.

I find the mathematical appendices inadequate. The problem is this: you shouldn't need to use the appendices BUT if you do need to use them, they aren't comprehensive enough to help.

De Boeck University