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Can you give an example of a problem you go through in the course?
Usually in economics we ask how economic agents (e.g. firms,
consumers, organizations or politicians) behave in a given environment
(e.g. a given market conduct, competition, or a given political system).
Mechanism Design goes one step deeper and asks "What is the optimal
environment if we want to achieve XY?" and also "Can we achieve XY in
any environment?". A few examples that we deal with in the course are
the questions: "The Ukraine dismantled the nuclear weapons it inherited
from the Soviet Union. Why was this the profit maximizing way of
selling them?" or "What is the tax system that maximizes social
welfare?" or "Can a social planner achieve efficient trade, that is
trade takes place whenever the buyer values the object more than the
seller, if players have private information?" or "How should students
be efficiently allocated to schools without giving them incentives to
game the mechanism?"
Are there any courses it would be an advantage to pass before this?
It is probably an advantage if you have already taken "Contract Theory and the Economics of Organization". You must have a solid knowledge of the material of Microeconomics C (especially dominant strategies and Bayesian Nash equilibrium) and the math courses of the Bachelor (especially maximization of functions, integration and basic statistics).
Does this course give you abilities to join other courses?
I think it gives you a deeper understanding in other courses. There are, for example, problems in Tax Policy (optimal income taxation), Auctions (optimal auction design) and Industrial Organization (non-linear pricing) that can only be solved using mechanism design tools. Teachers of these course, therefore, only talk loosely about these questions without properly solving them. You will understand these things much better after taking mechanism design.
If I like this course, are there any other course I can join which complements this?
Auctions would be a great complement and as mentioned above Contract Theory and the Economics of Organization is related.
What could be a master thesis topic related to your course?
Mechanism design is eventually a tool that you can use to analyze all kind of economic settings. If you want to write on questions of pricing, tax policy, auctions, regulation, contests, voting or innovation you will encounter papers using mechanism design in your literature search and might want to use the tools yourself in your thesis. For any question that asks for the optimal design of a setting (e.g. a policy, a pricing scheme, a regulatory scheme, the design of a market...) mechanism design is the tool you should use.
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