In economics, a transaction cost is a cost incurred when making an economic trade when participating in a market.
Paul Robert Milgrom is an American economist. He is the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, a position he has held since 1987. He is a professor in the Stanford School of Engineering as well and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Research. Milgrom is an expert in game theory, specifically auction theory and pricing strategies. He is the winner of the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Robert B. Wilson, "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats".
Social choice theory is the branch of welfare economics which studies processes of collective decision-making. It contrasts with political science in that it is a normative science studying how societies should make decisions, whereas political science is descriptive. Social choice incorporates insights from economics, mathematics, philosophy, and game theory to find the best ways to combine individual preferences into a coherent whole, called a social welfare function.
In an auction, bid shading is the practice of a bidder placing a bid that is below what they believe a bid is worth.
In mathematics and economics, the envelope theorem is a major result about the differentiability properties of the value function of a parameterized optimization problem. As we change parameters of the objective, the envelope theorem shows that, in a certain sense, changes in the optimizer of the objective do not contribute to the change in the objective function. The envelope theorem is an important tool for comparative statics of optimization models.
The Myerson–Satterthwaite theorem is an important result in mechanism design and the economics of asymmetric information, and named for Roger Myerson and Mark Satterthwaite. Informally, the result says that there is no efficient way for two parties to trade a good when they each have secret and probabilistically varying valuations for it, without the risk of forcing one party to trade at a loss.
Auction theory is a branch of applied economics that deals with how bidders act in auctions and researches how the features of auctions incentivise predictable outcomes. Auction theory is a tool used to inform the design of real-world auctions. Sellers use auction theory to raise higher revenues while allowing buyers to procure at a lower cost. The confluence of the price between the buyer and seller is an economic equilibrium. Auction theorists design rules for auctions to address issues that can lead to market failure. The design of these rulesets encourages optimal bidding strategies in a variety of informational settings. The 2020 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats."
Quantal response equilibrium (QRE) is a solution concept in game theory. First introduced by Richard McKelvey and Thomas Palfrey, it provides an equilibrium notion with bounded rationality. QRE is not an equilibrium refinement, and it can give significantly different results from Nash equilibrium. QRE is only defined for games with discrete strategies, although there are continuous-strategy analogues.
Susan Carleton Athey is an American economist. She is the Economics of Technology Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she has been a professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. She served as the consulting chief economist for Microsoft for six years and was a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research. She is currently on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, Ripple, and non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action. She also serves as the senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She is an associate director for the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the director of Golub Capital Social Impact Lab.
Roger Bruce Myerson is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago. He holds the title of the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Griffin Department of Economics, and the college. Previously, he held the title The Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics. In 2007, he was the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for "having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Alvin Eliot Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2017.
Market design is an interdisciplinary engineering-driven approach to economics and a practical methodology for creation of markets of certain properties, which is partially based on mechanism design. In market design, the focus is on the rules of exchange-- meaning who gets allocated what and by what procedure. Market design is concerned with the workings of particular markets in order to fix them when they are broken or to build markets when they are missing. Market design principles have been implemented in auction theory and matching theory.
Arunava Sen is a professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. He works on Game Theory, Social Choice Theory, Mechanism Design, Voting and Auctions.
Optimal capital income taxation is a subarea of optimal tax theory which studies the design of taxes on capital income such that a given economic criterion like utility is optimized.
Kevin W. S. Roberts was the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford until his retirement in 2020.
The economics of digitization is the field of economics that studies how digitization, digitalisation and digital transformation affects markets and how digital data can be used to study economics. Digitization is the process by which technology lowers the costs of storing, sharing, and analyzing data. This has changed how consumers behave, how industrial activity is organized, and how governments operate. The economics of digitization exists as a distinct field of economics for two reasons. First, new economic models are needed because many traditional assumptions about information no longer hold in a digitized world. Second, the new types of data generated by digitization require new methods for their analysis.
Fuhito Kojima is a Japanese economist and a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Peter Cramton is an American economist and academic. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, Emeritus since 2018, and holds the Market Design Chair in Economics at the University of Cologne.
Yeon-Koo Che (Korean: 최연구) is a Korean American economist. He is the Kelvin J. Lancaster Professor of Economic Theory at Columbia University, a position he held since 2009. Prior to joining Columbia in 2005, he was a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In economic theory, the Wilson doctrine stipulates that game theory should not rely excessively on common knowledge assumptions. Most prominently, it is interpreted as a request for institutional designs to be "detail-free". That is, mechanism designers should offer solutions that do not depend on market details because they may be unknown to practitioners or are subject to intractable change. The name is due to Nobel laureate Robert Wilson, who argued:
Game theory has a great advantage in explicitly analyzing the consequences of trading rules that presumably are really common knowledge; it is deficient to the extent it assumes other features to be common knowledge, such as one agent's probability assessment about another’s preferences or information. I foresee the progress of game theory as depending on successive reductions in the base of common knowledge required to conduct useful analyses of practical problems. Only by repeated weakening of common knowledge assumptions will the theory approximate reality.
