Transactions and Economic Relationships

该奖项资助经济理论工作，开发经济交易和关系结构的新模型。 该奖项资助两个不同项目的研究。 第一个项目考虑的问题，代理人的激励措施，投资于生产性的特点。 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价值取决于教师的人力资本投资和学校的物质资本投资，这些投资是在双方会面之前进行的。 存在一个潜在的套牢问题，这一问题可以通过市场双方的竞争得到改善：市场双方都存在潜在的替代品（尽管不完美），这限制了任何一方可以剥夺另一方投资回报的程度。 该项目的重点是多对一的匹配（这种情况的一个例子是学校雇用多名教师），并在统一定价下，当效率的条件不成立时，投资效率低下的性质。第二个项目的重点是合作的博弈论建模。 大多数真实的重复关系都包含一些私人监控--经济关系中的合作伙伴对各自采取的行动都有一些私人信息。 我们的目标是描述能够支持合作的行为类型，并直观地展示导致合理合作的行为约束。 这包括研究在具体情况下可能合作的程度由什么因素决定。 由于该项目将更好地了解参与者必须在匹配之前投资的市场的投资激励措施，因此通过深入了解可能的干预措施，结果将产生更广泛的影响，从而改善低效投资。

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.