微观经济学 行为制度和演化.pptVIP

The Walrasian detour Virtually all of the main ideas making up the post Walrasian paradigm were developed more than 4 decades ago by highly recognized scholars. Nash, Zeuthen, VN-M (game theory, including evolutionary, bargaining) Simon, Schelling (non market social interactions) Coase (transactions costs, authority in the firm) Alchian, Becker (evoutionary modeling zero intelligence age) Duesenbery, Leibenstein (endogenous preferences, state dependent preferences) Myrdal (multiple equilibria) Why did these ideas proliferate in the 1990s and not the 1960s? Time for a break? Lecture 1, part 2Institutions and Games Courbet, Enterrement a Ornans Coordination failures and the classical constitutional conundrum? The study of institutions is motivated by the importance of coordination failures as a cause of human suffering Coordination failure: non cooperative interaction leading to a result that is not P-efficient. The conundrum: How can social interactions be structured so that people are free to choose their own actions while avoiding outcomes that none would have chosen? Modern fields of econ addressing this question: welfare economics, implementation theory, optimal contract theory Game theory is the fundamental analytical tool for the study of economic institutions. Why do coordination failures occur, generically? The reason why uncoordinated activities of individuals pursuing their own ends often produce outcomes that all would seek to avoid is that each person’s actions affect the well-being of others and these effects are often not included in whatever optimizing process or rule of thumb which results in the actions taken by the relevant actors. More simply: actors to not take appropriate account of the effects of their actions on others. Incomplete contracts are one of the reasons why this happpens The problem thus concerns both preferences and constraints (e.g. people do not care about others, and they are not constrained to act as if they did care)