Topics in Economic Theory

该奖项资助了经济理论中两个不同主题的研究。第一个项目开发了受诱惑影响的决策建模的新方法。这个想法是，一个人认为他/她未来的自己是由目前未知的“欲望”驱动的，这可能与他目前对自己想要消费的东西的看法相冲突。令人惊讶的是，这种方法在数学上等同于最近的另一种方法，即人们期望未来的自己在一定的“自我控制”成本下选择消费什么以最大化他当前的效用。第二个项目用证据研究实施情况。更准确地说，PI和他的合作者考虑的是当代理人可能拥有证据来支持他们的主张时，社会制度的最佳设计。它们表明，证据的使用对通过适当设计的制度所能取得的成果具有巨大影响。由于几乎所有关于这一主题的工作都忽略了证据的可能可用性，这些结果对重新思考最优制度设计理论具有重要意义。本课题是经济理论的基础研究。它具有更广泛的影响，因为它增加了一个工具包，经济学、商业、政治学和法学的研究人员可以用它来建立包含人类行为重要方面的模型。

This award funds research on two distinct topics in economic theory. The first project develops new approaches to the modeling of decision making subject to temptation. The idea is that a person views his/her own future self as driven by currently unknown 'desires' which may conflict with the person's current view of what he wishes to consume. Surprisingly, this approach turns out to be mathematically equivalent to alternative recent approaches where the person expects his future self to choose what to consume to maximize his current utility subject to certain 'self control' costs. The second project studies implementation with evidence. More precisely, the PI and his collaborator consider the optimal design of social institustions when agents may posess evidence to back up their claims. They show that the use of evidence has dramatic effects on what can be achieved via appropriately designed institutions. Since virtually all work on this topic has ignored the possible availability of evidence, these results have important implications for rethinking the theory of optimal institutional design.This project is basic research in economic theory. It has broader impacts because it adds to a toolkit that researchers in economics, business, political science, and law can use to build models that incorporate important aspects of human behavior.