Objective
"Economic theory is in a crisis. In our lifetime, we have witnessed revolutions in the field that have enriched economics with new models and concepts: the information revolution in the 70's, the game theory mania in the 80's and to a lesser extent the emergence of models of bounded rationality in the 90's. But it's been a long time since we've seen any exciting developments in economic theory.
The first part of the project is methodological. I would like to persuade young researchers that the current style of economic theory is one of the factors behind this stagnation. At the core of this part of the project is a future book discussing the style of modeling in economic theory. My plan is to ""re-write"" a sample of top journals papers and to demonstrate that the ideas in those papers could and should have been presented through much simpler models and in far shorter papers.
The above dissatisfaction brings me to the second and more pretentious part of the project. I would like to use my experience in coming up with original models in economic theory in order to construct some truly novel models. I seek a fresh start, to whatever extent that is possible, which would hopefully yield entirely new models based on non-conventional primitives. In particular, I would like to use novel typologies of economic agents.
This objective is related to the third part of the project, which is motivated by my recent experimental work. My goal is to find correlations in the behavior of subjects and to use them in defining new ""typologies"" of economic agents. The experiments would involve surveys with large samples (obtained through my pedagogical website gametheory.tau.ac.il and media connections), which are essential for such a task; however, at the same time, I intend to use standard experimental procedures in order to minimize any reservations that might arise regarding my experimental methods."
Fields of science
Call for proposal
ERC-2010-AdG_20100407
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Funding Scheme
ERC-AG - ERC Advanced GrantHost institution
69978 Tel Aviv
Israel