演講者簡介 : Professor Ricardo Serrano-Padial received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, San Diego in 2007. He is currently an Associate Professor in Economics at Drexel University. His main research fields are microeconomic theory, information economics, finance, and behavioral economics.
演講摘要 : We study games played by a population of heterogeneous agents in which payoffs depend on the average action. We uncover two properties underlying the structure of payoffs and beliefs. First, we identify the necessary and sufficient condition on payoffs, quasilinearity, for the game to be a potential game. Under quasilinearity the impact of the average action is linear in own action and symmetric across player types. Second, we show that, when players have incomplete information about some aggregate parameter due to idiosyncratic noise, their beliefs about the average action satisfy a generalized Laplacian property: the (weighted) average belief is given by the uniform distribution. Combining both properties we prove the equivalence between two popular equilibrium selection rules in games with strategic complementarities, potential maximization and the global games selection. We characterize the selected equilibrium, which can be interpreted as maximizing the ex-ante expected payoff of a player with marginal beliefs. We also provide novel robust comparative statics results for games with quasilinear payoffs.
