Preface

This book has emerged from several courses and lecture series I gave over the last few years, usually in front of a diverse audience of graduate students and researchers with a background in economics or in mathematics.The goal of this work is to provide a concise treatment of discrete choice models and their applications, leveraging the powerful elegance of mathematics.The mathematical foundation of these models is half optimization theory and half probability and statistics.As we shall explore, there are intricate connections with the theory of optimal transport, which was the subject of my previous book, Optimal Transport Methods in Economics.However, in these lectures the framework is broader.The focus is on choice, demand, price formation, and equilibrium, and the statistical estimation of the related models.The exposition is influenced by my own research, and, more broadly, reflects my personal tastes, so there is no attempt at an exhaustive treatment of these models.It is not a survey or a guide to the literature.