The MIT Press
5 total works
A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation
by Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole
The book's clear and logical organization begins with an introduction that summarizes regulatory practices, recounts the history of thought that led to the emergence of the new regulatory economics, sets up the basic structure of the model, and previews the economic questions tackled in the next seventeen chapters. The structure of the model developed in the introductory chapter remains the same throughout subsequent chapters, ensuring both stability and consistency. The concluding chapter discusses important areas for future work in regulatory economics. Each chapter opens with a discussion of the economic issues, an informal description of the applicable model, and an overview of the results and intuition. It then develops the formal analysis, including sufficient explanations for those with little training in information economics or game theory. Bibliographic notes provide a historical perspective of developments in the area and a description of complementary research. Detailed proofs are given of all major conclusions, making the book valuable as a source of modern research techniques. There is a large set of review problems at the end of the book.
This advanced text introduces the principles of noncooperative game theory—including strategic form games, Nash equilibria, subgame perfection, repeated games, and games of incomplete information—in a direct and uncomplicated style that will acquaint students with the broad spectrum of the field while highlighting and explaining what they need to know at any given point. The analytic material is accompanied by many applications, examples, and exercises. The theory of noncooperative games studies the behavior of agents in any situation where each agent's optimal choice may depend on a forecast of the opponents' choices. "Noncooperative" refers to choices that are based on the participant's perceived selfinterest. Although game theory has been applied to many fields, Fudenberg and Tirole focus on the kinds of game theory that have been most useful in the study of economic problems. They also include some applications to political science. The fourteen chapters are grouped in parts that cover static games of complete information, dynamic games of complete information, static games of incomplete information, dynamic games of incomplete information, and advanced topics.
The Economics of Uncertainty and Information may be used in conjunction with Loffont's Fundamentals of Economics in an advanced course in microeconomics. Both texts provide a thorough account of modern thinking on the subject and a wealth of carefully chosen examples and problems. The first four chapters of The Economics of Uncertainty and Information summarize the essential tools of the analysis of uncertainty and information: the theory of individual behavior under uncertainty, the measures of risk aversion and the measures of risk, and the notions of certainty equivalence and information structure. Subsequent chapters introduce the theory of contingent markets, model systems of incomplete markets and define the concept of a perfect foresight equilibrium, cover two fundamental institutions for sharing risk - the stock market and insurance, show how the transmission of information by prices renders information structures endogenous, and study personalized exchange with asymmetric information. Each chapter concludes with a list of suggested readings and with auxiliary sections which go into more detail about certain aspects of the subject. The book concludes with review problems and exercises.