Monetary Policy in Interdependent Economies provides the first comprehensive overview of the implications of using game theory to analyze interactions among national monetary policymakers. It synthesizes the pessimistic view of sovereign policymaking that results from the analysis of one-shot games with the optimistic view derived from the analysis of quid pro quo strategies in repeated games.
In this unusual book, first published by The MIT Press in 1980 and now updated with a new chapter, Steven Brams applies the mathematical theory of games to the Hebrew Bible. Brams's thesis is that God and the human biblical characters acted rationally—that is, given their preferences and their knowledge of other players' preferences, they made strategy choices that led to the best attainable outcomes.
In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents with perfect information and unlimited time. About forty years ago, Herbert Simon challenged this view with his notion of "bounded rationality." Today, bounded rationality has become a fashionable term used for disparate views of reasoning.
General equilibrium and AGE modeling are both active fields of research. Yet the applied model builder often finds the style of theoretical papers inaccessible, while the theoretician hardly recognizes the concepts used in the equations of applied models. The Structure of Applied General Equilibrium Models bridges that gap through a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of the applied models.
Markets are one of the most salient institutions produced by humans, and economists have traditionally analyzed the workings of the market mechanism. Recently, however, economists and others have begun to appreciate the many institution-related events and phenomena that have a significant impact on economic performance. Examples include the demise of the communist states, the emergence of Silicon Valley and e-commerce, the European currency unification, and the East Asian financial crises.
As computers advance from isolated workstations to linked elements in complex communities of systems and people, cooperation and coordination via intelligent agents become increasingly important. Examples of such communities include the Internet, electronic commerce, health institutions, electricity networks, and digital libraries.
The "oligopoly problem"—the question of how prices are formed when the market contains only a few competitors—is one of the more persistent problems in the history of economic thought. In this book Xavier Vives applies a modern game-theoretic approach to develop a theory of oligopoly pricing.
The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive view of applications of the cost of capital. The cost of capital is the key concept in the analysis of taxation of business income. It is also critical to the formulation of a new system of national accounts, where it plays the role of the price of capital services. Empirical measurements of productivity and economic welfare generated by these accounts underlie recent innovations in the econometric modeling of consumer and producer behavior.
The objectives of econometric modeling of producer behavior are to determine the nature of substitution among inputs and outputs and of differences in technology, as well as the role of economies of scale in production. Recent advances in methodology, based on the dual formulation of the theory of production in terms of prices, have enabled econometricians to achieve these objectives more effectively. This volume summarizes the economic theory, the econometric methodology, and the empirical findings resulting from the new approach.