Transactions and Economic Relationships

该奖项基金致力于开发经济交易结构和关系的新模型的经济理论。该奖项为两个不同项目的研究提供资金。第一个项目考虑了关于代理人投资于生产性特征的激励的问题。在许多市场中，一对代理人(个人或组织)进行交易，交易的价值取决于代理人在匹配之前所做的投资。教师和学校之间的匹配的价值取决于教师所做的人力资本投资和学校的实物资本投资，这两项投资是在双方开会之前进行的。存在一个潜在的阻碍问题，这个问题因市场双方的竞争而得到改善：市场两边都有潜在的替代品(尽管不完美)，限制了任何一方可以在多大程度上侵占可归因于另一方投资的回报。该项目的重点是多对一匹配(这种情况的一个例子是聘请多名教师的学校)，以及当效率的条件不存在时，统一定价下的投资低效的本质。第二个项目重点是合作的博弈论建模。大多数现实世界中的重复关系包括一些私人监控--经济关系中的合作伙伴都有一些关于每个人采取的行动的私人信息。我们的目标是描述能够支持合作的行为类型，并直观地展示对导致合理合作的行为的约束。这包括关于如何确定在特定情况下可能合作的程度的工作。由于该项目将更好地了解参与者在匹配之前必须投资的市场中的投资激励措施，因此该项目的结果将通过对可能的干预措施的洞察来产生更广泛的影响，这些干预措施将改善低效投资。

This award funds work in economic theory that develops new models of the structure of economic transactions and relationships. The award funds research on two distinct projects. The first project considers questions about agents' incentives to invest in productive characteristics. In many markets, a pair of agents (individuals or organizations) transacts, and the value of the transaction depends on investments the agents have made prior to their match. The value of a match between a teacher and a school depends on the human capital investments made by the teacher and the physical capital investment of the schook, which are made prior to the parties meeting. There is a potential holdup problem, which is ameliroated by the competition on both sides of the market: there are potential substitutes on both sides of the market (albeit imperfect) that limit the degree to which either side can expropriate returns that can be attributed to investment by the other side. The project focuses on many-to-one matching (an example of this situation is schools that hire multiple teachers) and on the nature of investment inefficiencies under uniform pricing when the conditions for efficiency do not hold.The second project focuses on game theoretic modeling of cooperation. Most real world repeated relationships include some private monitoring -- the partners in the economic relationship have some private information about the actions each takes. The goal is to characterize the kinds of behavior that can support cooperation and to demonstrate intuitively plausible constraints on behavior that lead to plausible cooperation. This includes work on what determines the magnitude of possible cooperation in a specific situation. Because the project will provide a better understanding of investment incentives in markets where participants must invest before matching, the results will yield broader impact through insights into possible interventions that will ameliorate inefficient investments.