Calendrier du 10 septembre 2020
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 10/09/2020 de 12:30 à 13:30
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
GLEYZE Simon (PSE)
Informationally Simple Incentives
We consider a mechanism design setting in which agents can acquire costly information on their preferences as well as others’. The choice of the mechanism generates informational incentives as it affects what information is acquired before play begins. A mechanism is informationally simple if agents have no incentive to learn about others’ preferences. This property is of interest for two reasons: First, we show that a mechanism is ex-ante strategy-proof only if it is informationally simple. Second, this endogenizes an “independent private value” property of the interim information structure. Our main result is that a mechanism is informationally simple only if it is dictatorial. This holds for generic environments and any smooth cost function which satisfies an Inada condition. Hence even (interim) strategy-proof mechanisms incentivize agents to learn about others and are not ex-ante strategy-proof. Moreover, the Independent Private Value assumption is unlikely to arise endogenously, though we show that endogenous information acquisition resolves the discontinuity associated with full surplus extraction.
Behavior seminar
Du 10/09/2020 de 11:00 à 12:00
online
OSWALD Andrew (University of Warwick)
Physical Pain, Gender, and the Business Cycle in 146 Nations
écrit avec Lucia Macchia
This paper is a cross-national study of physical pain over the business cycle. It is, to our knowledge, the first inquiry of its type. Using a sample of 146 countries, and fixed-effects methods, the paper shows that physical pain falls in a boom and rises in a downturn. The increases in pain are borne almost exclusively by women. Estimated effect-sizes are substantial. The paper’s conclusions have paradoxical aspects. The counter-cyclicality of physical pain, for example, is not what would be predicted by conventional analysis. During an economic expansion, people typically work harder and longer, and many kinds of accidents and injuries increase. Nor are the paper’s results due to unemployed citizens experiencing more pain (although they do). At the conceptual level the study’s findings are consistent with an important hypothesis proposed recently, using different kinds of evidence, by brain and behavioural-science researchers such as Katja Wiech and Irene Tracey (2009) and Eileen Chou and colleagues (2016). That hypothesis states that economic worry itself can create physical pain.