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| 2003 | PhD, Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA | | 2003 - 2007 | Assistant Professor, Princeton University, NJ, USA | | Since 2007 | Professor of Economics, University of Bonn |
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My past research has focused on a number of different areas. In mechanism design, I have studied the trade-off between efficiency and revenue (or deficit) that a designer choosing a trading mechanism will face when buyers and sellers have private information about their preferences and the number of traders is large. In evolutionary game theory, I have studied models with persistent randomness (think mutations or experiments) where individuals live in isolated subpopulations and individuals from different subpopulations rarely interact with each other. In bargaining theory, I have studied how bargaining outcomes are affected by the fact that players have access to commitment devices (say they can attempt to commit to a certain price) but the devices they have access to are imperfect (agents often end up uncommitted) and better devices are very costly to use. In the context of contest theory, I have studied the design of optimal contests when players exhibit non-standard preferences, for example, use hyperbolic discounting.
Several of the above topics will also be relevant for my future research. As far as bargaining is concerned, I plan to work more on understanding situations where players are symmetric in terms of their bargaining power but have asymmetric information about the intensity of their preferences and their attitude towards risk. (For the case where both parties have equal bargaining power but there is asymmetric information there is no equally widely accepted and used solution concept as the Nash bargaining solution for the case of symmetric information.) I also plan to study situations where bargaining occurs in several dimensions and there is asymmetric information about the other side’s priorities. (The economic theory literature has heavily concentrated on the “distributive” aspect of bargaining, i.e. the problem of how to “divide a pie” between two players. Much less attention was placed on the “integrative” aspect of bargaining focusing on learning the interests of the other party in situations where it is not ex ante clear which agreements create the highest surplus.) Of course, bargaining theory is just one of my interests and there are also questions in mechanism design and evolutionary game theory that I plan to work on.
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Research Area I
In older work [1], I have worked on mechanism design, in particular questions related to the size of inefficiencies arising when trade is conducted in the presence of asymmetric information. My most current work deals with bargaining and uses tools from cooperative and non-cooperative game theory. An important topic is the role of imperfect commitment in bargaining environments and the question how observed bargaining outcomes are effected if players have some limited ability to commit ex-ante. |
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[ 1] Tymon Tatur
On the trade off between deficit and inefficiency and the double auction with a fixed transaction fee
Econometrica , 73: (2): 517--570
2005
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0262.2005.00587.x |
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Christian Seel (2011): “Four Essays in Economic Theory”,
now Assistant Professor, Maastricht University, Netherlands
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