Contributions to microeconomic theory
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation consists of contributions to three different "waves" or "eras" of microeconomic theory from around 1950 until today. All three contributions concern environments featuring uncertainty. In the first of these three eras, the focus was largely on choice theory, both individual and social, and on equilibrium in perfectly competitive markets. My first chapter contributes to the theory of individual choice. I provide axiomatic foundations for supermodularity and quasisupermodularity of Bernoulli utility functions in the context of choice over lotteries. In the second of the eras, the focus shifted to game theory and to its application to information economics and mechanism design. In Chapter 2, I provide a contribution to this literature: I analyze the problem of designing dynamic mechanisms for agents who learn about a common component of their valuation through experience, and privately: Whoever gets a unit today acquires a private signal about the common value, aside from enjoying immediate surplus. Thus, allocating a unit today creates an informational asymmetry tomorrow. This problem resembles economic environments where parties interacting over time privately gather socially valuable information, and when this information acquisition is a result of the outcome of their interaction, rather than being exogenously given. Recently, microeconomic theorists have begun to turn their attention towards behavioral economics, and towards problems where are boundedly rational is some fashion, and hence they are unable to find the "optimal" course of action in the complex environment that they inhabit. Chapter 3 concerns the second type of behavioral problem. A decision maker faces a finite set of alternatives and every period chooses a subset from this set. The values of the alternatives are drawn from an unknown distribution, and the decision maker only observes the realized values of those alternatives in the chosen subset. Due to the information structure of this problem, we are unable to fully characterize optimal strategies. Instead, I propose and analyze heuristics.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Francetich, Alejandro |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Business |
| Primary advisor | Kreps, David M |
| Primary advisor | Skrzypacz, Andrzej, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Kreps, David M |
| Thesis advisor | Skrzypacz, Andrzej, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Wilson, Robert, 1937- |
| Advisor | Wilson, Robert, 1937- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Alejandro Francetich. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Business. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2013. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/bb684yb3761 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Alejandro Francetich
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...