Markets, Mechanism Design and Decision Theory

理解不确定条件下的决策问题是经济学中最重要的问题之一。长期以来，经济学家和决策理论家一直在寻求为人们如何感知和应对不确定性的现实模型奠定严密的基础。五十多年来，期望效用理论一直是包含不确定性的理论和应用工作的主导范式。然而，这一理论存在着严重的缺陷。例如，著名的Allais和Ellsberg悖论表明，决策者经常系统地违反预期效用公理。在Allais悖论的情况下，这些违规行为的形式是曲解小概率事件，而在Ellsberg悖论的情况下，这些违规行为未能形成独特的主观先验并以概率复杂的方式使用它。同样，Kahneman和Tversky在前景理论和损失厌恶方面的开创性工作表明，决策者对损失的反应往往不同于对收益的反应。这个项目将使用具有模糊性的模型来研究各种问题。当决策者对其决策的不同可能结果的概率没有准确的概念时，模棱两可就会出现。该项目将专注于开发数学技术来描述抽象选择问题中的个人偏好。它还将分析模糊性对市场和激励制度设计的影响。结果将包括更深入地了解不确定性对重要资源分配机制的影响。这些结果将对其他学者和政策制定者有用，他们对一系列问题感兴趣，从创新的时机和结构，到为什么人们使用相对简单的安排，如英国拍卖进行买卖。

Understanding decision making under uncertainty is one of the most important problems in economics. Economists and decision theorists have long sought to develop rigorous foundations for realistic models of how people perceive and respond to uncertainty. The expected utility theory has been the dominant paradigm for both theoreticaland applied work incorporating uncertainty for over fifty years. However, there are serious shortcomings in this theory. For example, the well-known paradoxes of Allais and Ellsberg suggest that decision makers routinely and systematically violate expected utility axioms. These violations take the form of misinterpreting small probability events in the case of the Allais paradox, and failing to form a unique subjective prior and use it in a probabilistically sophisticated way in the case of Ellsberg's paradox. Similarly, Kahneman and Tversky's seminal work on prospect theory and loss aversion shows that decision makers often respond differently to losses than to gains.This project will study a variety of problems using models featuring ambiguity. Ambiguity appears when decision makers do not have a precise idea of the probability of the different possible outcomes of their decisions. The project will focus on developing mathematical techniques for describing individual's preferences in abstract choice problems. It will also analyze the implications of ambiguity on markets and on the design of incentive systems. Results will include a deeper understanding of the effects of uncertainty on important resource allocation mechanisms. These results will be useful to other scholars and to policymakers interested in a range of questions from the timing and structure of innovation to why people use relatively simple arrangements such as English auctions for buying and selling.