Professor Marek may have taught me some of the most practical lessons I'll learn in my undergraduate education at UCLA. We dealt with optimal purchasing strategies in auctions and matching mechanisms in practical situations: from Ebay, to the system residents go through when being paired with hospitals. He's a laid back professor who made the concepts easy to understand. If nothing else he opened my eyes to the many more problems I've been navigated through using these systems. I'd suggest him to any student.

I took this class Spring of 2017 and enjoyed this class overall. The professor does a pretty solid job making the lecture engaging and tying the content to real life scenarios. Both the professor and all the TA's want you to succeed in the course and are great teachers. The content isn't particularly difficult either, but does get harder during Week 8 and 9 because of all the fractions.

The first half of the class focuses on different matching mechanisms while the second half focuses on auctions.

Grading Breakdown:
30% Max {Midterm, Final}
30% Max {Group Essay, Final}
10% Max {Presentation, Group Essay, Final}
30% Final

So yes you technically only need to take the final. Everything else is pretty much insurance if you screw up on the final. But be aware that the final content and the test itself was harder than the midterm (which was super easy). Also everyone did super well on the midterm so I'd recommend not just taking the final.