Rational and boundedly rational behavior in sender-receiver games

We consider a signalling game in which a population of receivers decide on the outcome by majority rule, sender and receivers have conflicting interests, and there is uncertainty about both players’ types. We model players rationality along the lines of recent findings in behavioral game theory. We characterize the structure of the equilibria in the reduced game so obtained. We find that all pure strategy equilibria are consistent with successful attempts to mislead the receivers, and relate them to the message bin Laden sent on the eve of the 2004 US Presidential elections. The same result holds if we allow for some uncertainty about the sign of the correlation between the sender’s and the receivers’ payoffs.

Heterogeneous adaptive expectations and cobweb phenomena

We study a cobweb-type commodity market where n firms operate and characterised by a strictly monotone demand and supply. The firms are assumed to differ in a key parameter governing price expectations which we suppose to be adaptive. We characterise the unique steady state of the resulting economic dynamics in terms of stability and we study the impact of the number and diversity of firms: to this end we introduce the notions of structural and behavioural degree of instability which prove to be crucial in determining whether stability or instability prevail. We also consider the case of market merging and establish conditions to have stability (or instability) in the aggregated market in terms of the original (structural and behavioural) degrees of instability. We take up the issue of transitional dynamics and speed of convergence when the system is stable and characterise parametric configurations that maximise the speed of convergence. Motivated by the difficulty to actually observe expectations, whereas it is easier to measure some structural features of a given market, such as the relevant demand and supply price elasticities, we take the perspective of an observer (e.g. a policy maker) whose information set includes the structural but not the behavioural degree of instability. We therefore assume the firms - via the parameter which defines their expectations - are sampled independently from a population described by a given probability distribution. In this case the structural degree of instability determines how the number of potentially different firms affects the probability of ending up with a stable outcome. Analytical results are provided alongside numerical evidence.heterogeneous agents, expectations, stability of steady states, market merging, speed of convergence

Infrared Imaging: a New Process Analytical Technology for Real Time Monitoring and Control of a Freeze-Drying Process

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Dynamics in Non-Binding Procurement Auctions with Boundedly Rational Bidders

We study a procurement auction recently analysed by Gal-Or et al. (2007). In this auction game the buyer ranks different bids on the basis of both the prices submitted and the quality of each bidder that is her private information. We emphasise the similarity between this model and existing models of competition in horizontally differentiated markets. Finally we illustrate conditions for the existence and the stability of such equilibrium. To this end we extend the model to a dynamic setting in which a sequence of independent auctions takes place. We assume bidders have bounded rationality in a twofold sense. On one hand, they use an underparametrized model of their competitors’ behaviour, best responding to expectations on average bids rather than keeping track of the entire vector of competitors’ bids. On the other they update expectations adaptively. In a general framework with more than two bidders the system may fail to converge to the steady state, i.e. to the symmetric Nash equilibrium of the original game.Non-binding auctions, Product differentiation, Hotelling Duopoly, Expectations, Stability of steady states

Information Disclosure in Procurement Auctions with Horizontally Differentiated Suppliers

This work studies a model of multidimensional auction in which a buyer needs to procure a given good from either of two potential suppliers whose quality is the buyer's private information and whose production costs are heterogeneous. Costs asymmetries constitute a novelty in this framework and extend e.g. the model of Gal-Or et al. (2007). We compare the outcomes of different procurement policies from the viewpoint of both efficiency and the buyer's payoff. A trade-off between efficiency and rent-extraction emerges. The buyer will maximize her expected utility by selecting a first score auction and either concealing or privately revealing suppliers'quality - the optimal choice depending on the degree of heterogeneity in suppliers' costs and qualities. However, neither of these auction mechanisms will be efficient: efficiency calls for a second score auction or a first score auction with public disclosure of suppliersquality. The findings hinge on the equivalence between auction models and models of horizontal differentiation and take advantage of results for asymmetric auctions developed by Maskin & Riley (2000).multidimensional auctions, procurement policies, endogenous information, horizontal di¤erentiation, asymmetric auctions.