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Complexity and Simplicity in Economic Mechanisms

Ziel

As more and more economic activity is moving to the Internet, familiar economic mechanisms are being deployed
at unprecedented scales of size, speed, and complexity. In many cases this new complexity becomes the defining
feature of the deployed economic mechanism and the quantitative difference becomes a key qualitative one.
A well-studied example of such situations is how the humble single-item auction suddenly becomes a
billion-times repeated online ad auction, or even becomes a combinatorial auction with exponentially
many possible outcomes. Similar complexity explosions occur with various markets, with information
dissemination, with pricing structures, and with many other economic mechanisms.

The aim of this proposal is to study the role and implications of such complexity and to start
developing a coherent economic theory that can handle it. We aim to identify various measures of
complexity that are crucial bottlenecks and study them. Examples of such complexities include the
amount of access to data, the length of the description of a mechanism, its communication requirements,
the cognitive complexity required from users, and, of course, the associated computational complexity.
On one hand we will attempt finding ways of effectively dealing with complexity when it is needed, and on
the other hand, attempt avoiding complexity, when possible, replacing it with ``simple'' alternatives
without incurring too large of a loss.

Finanzierungsplan

ERC-ADG - Advanced Grant

Gastgebende Einrichtung

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM
Netto-EU-Beitrag
€ 2 026 706,00
Adresse
EDMOND J SAFRA CAMPUS GIVAT RAM
91904 Jerusalem
Israel

Auf der Karte ansehen

Aktivitätstyp
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Gesamtkosten
€ 2 026 706,00

Begünstigte (1)