What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
One lecture a week, Monday, twelve weeks straight. Each page below names what’s covered and who’s teaching it — Professor Sunk Costa runs the first act (search, signaling, screening), Professor Barry Gaining takes over once the market gets two-sided (matching, bargaining, repeated play).
Love as a Market
Orientation — why this course treats romance as a market, what that buys you, and what it costs
Week 1 · 21 February 2028
Discovery & Search Costs
Why looking for a partner is a search problem, and why every search technology changes the answer
Week 2 · 28 February 2028
Cheap Talk vs. Costly Signals
What separates a claim anyone could make from one that actually reveals something
Week 3 · 6 March 2028
Red Flags & Adverse Selection
Akerlof's market for lemons, and why the worst-behaved participants are often the easiest to find
Week 4 · 13 March 2028
Screening Games
How the uninformed side of a market can force information out of the informed side
Week 5 · 20 March 2028
The Secretary Problem
Optimal stopping, the 1/e rule, and why "you'll know when you know" is a bad strategy
Week 6 · 27 March 2028
The Cost of Asking
Why someone has to move first, what it costs them, and what game theory says about waiting the other person out
Week 7 · 10 April 2028
Stable Matching
Gale–Shapley, and why an algorithm that guarantees stability doesn't guarantee anything else
Week 8 · 17 April 2028
Household Bargaining
Nash bargaining, surplus, and what actually gets negotiated once the matching is done
Week 9 · 24 April 2028
Repeated Games & Trust
Why the same one-shot game plays out completely differently once you expect to play it again tomorrow
Week 10 · 1 May 2028
Mechanism Design for Two
Working backwards from the outcome you want to the rules that would produce it
Week 11 · 8 May 2028
Exit Markets & the Redesign
Divorce as an exit market, and the semester's one required act of self-doubt about its own framework
Week 12 · 15 May 2028