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1 The Importance of Irreversibility and Learning - Familiar 11 Bxamples Revisited 1. 1 Neoclassical Investment Models: A Brief Survey 11 1. 1. 1 The Standard Neoclassical Investment Theory Model 13 1. 1. 2 The Investment Model with Adjustment Costs 15 1. 1. 3 The Irreversibility of Investment 17 1. 1. 4 Delivery Lags 18 1. 2 Flexible Manufacturing Systems 22 1. 2. 1 Some Basic Facts about Manufacturing 23 1. 2. 2 The Determinants of the Flexibility of Manufacturing Systems 25 1. 2. 3 Manufacturing as a Multiperiod Choice Problem 28 1. 3 Conclusions 30 2 The Role of Irreversibility and Learning in Sequential Decision Problems - Basic Concepts 33 2. 1 The Two-Period Model without Uncertainty 33 2. 1. 1 The Elements of the Model 34 2. 1. 2 Economic Examples 37 2. 1. 3 Some Basic Results 39 2. 1. 4 Intertemporal Opportunity Costs 42 2. 2 The Two-Period Model with Uncertainty 46 2. 2. 1 The Elements of the Kodel 46 2. 2. 2 Special Cases 50 2. 2. 3 Flexibility and the Value of Information 54 2. 2. 4 An Example: Waiting to Invest 56 2. 3 Switching Costs 59 2. 3. 1 The Extended Model 59 2. 3. 2 An Example: Money Demand as Demand for Flexibility 61 2. 4 Summary and Outlook 63 3 Determinants of the Optimal Choice in Sequential Decision Problems - The Two-Period Case 65 3. 1 The Formulation of the Problem 66 3. 1.
This book was accepted in 1999 as doctoral thesis (Dr. oec. publ. ) by the faculty of economics of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich. It won the dissertation price of the Alumni-Club of the economics faculty in the academic year 2000. Financial assistance by the German Research Asso ciation (DFG) for printing costs is gratefully acknowledged. I have to thank the people behind the B\'IF,X-project, in particular Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport, for their wonderful typesetting program. The supervisors of my thesis were Prof. Dr. G. Flaig and Prof. Dr. D. Marin. I would like thank both for their thorough reading of the book and their ideas and critical remarks. lowe much gratitude to my academic teacher Prof. Dr. G. Flaig for many insightful conversations about modern time series econometrics, asymptotic theory and data problems. His empha sis on clear theory combined with sound econometric methods formed my personal ideal of how to do applied economics. After he left the university in 1998I had the opportunity to continue my work at the Center for Economic Studies. Prof. Dr. H. -W. Sinn and my new colleaguesat CES provided a stim ulating environment for the completion of my dissertation. Finally, I want to thank my parents, my sister and my friends for being there and sharing my cheers and worries. Munich, October 2000 Michael Reutter Our main concern in philosophy and in science should be the search fortruth. Justification is not an aim; and brilliance and cleverness as such are boring.
I first came across the issue of derivatives documentation when writing my diploma thesis on measuring the credit risk ofOTC derivatives while I was an economics student at the University of Bonn. Despite the fact that security design has been an area of research in economics for many years and despite the widespread use of derivatives documentation in financial practice, the task of designing contracts for derivatives transactions has not been dealt with in financial theory. The one thing that aroused my curiosity was that two parties with usually opposing interests, namely banking supervisors and the banking industry's lobby, unanimously endorse the use ofcertain provisions in standardized contracts called master agreements. Do these provisions increase the ex ante efficiency of contracts for all parties involved? I actually began my research expecting to find support for the widely held beliefs about the efficiency or inefficiency of certain provisions and was sur prised to obtain results that contradicted the conventional wisdom. I would strongly advise against using these results in any political debate on deriva tives documentation. They were obtained within a highly stylized model with some restrictive assumptions. This work should rather be seen as an attempt to formalize the discussion on derivatives documentation and to challenge the notion that certain provisions are generally ex ante efficient. It is also an invitation to all those advocating the use of certain provisions in master agreements to formalize their arguments and to explain the economic ratio nale behind these provisions.
This book was born out of a five-years research at Sonderforschungsbe reich 303 by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitiit Bonn and was approved as my doctoral thesis by the Rechts-und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultiit in December 1994. It was my former colleague Wolfgang Peters who had drawn my atten tion to overlapping-generations models and to problems of intergenerational efficiency and distribution. The subtle connection between the latter two has been fascinating me from the very beginning: redistribution of the results of free trade can become necessary from the point of view of efficiency, although no externalities hamper the development of an economy. In spite of being a matured part of economics, neoclassical growth theory had left many questions unsolved, some of them even unrecognized by a large part of our profession. I took up the challenge to contribute to the investigation of some of these thorny problems. One of these issues is the often quoted idea of the inter generational con tract. Although intergenerational transfers can improve intertemporal effi ciency, the design of pension schemes to achieve an improvement of well-being of some generations without hurting that of any other, is not an easy task in an economy with flexible prices. Quite frequently, only interest rate and growth rate are taken into account when deciding on whether a generation wins or looses.
One of the most fascinating debates of our times is the discussion over the merits and capabilities of market economies. Very often, one sees strong endorsements to the idea that markets provide an efficient way of allocating resources. Some years ago, opposite views on this issue used to be very popular (at least in Europe) and were held by similarly qualified people. In my opinion, the contribution of economics to this question can not be dismissed on the grounds that economics still in its infancy and that this question is a "practical" one (whatever this means). Economics started with similar naive ideas, two hundred years ago. In particular it has taken a long time to realize that competition does not work in such a smooth way as many classical writers thought it did, and that many facts can not be explained by the theory of perfectly competitive markets. This issue is explored at depth in the Introduction to this Lectures. In this sense the contribution of the Theory of industrial Organization has been to make a convincing case for the view that monopoly and oligopoly can persist in the long run in a world populated by rational agents. Despite of the fact that we are far from having a satisfactory theory of how markets work, progress has been immense, and we certainly understand why current theories are still not completely satisfactory.
An analysis of the learning behavior of genetic algorithms in economic systems with mutual interaction, such as markets. These systems are characterized by a state-dependent fitness function and - for the first time - mathematical results characterizing the long-term outcome of genetic learning in such systems are provided. The usefulness of such results is illustrated by many simulations in evolutionary games and economic models.
This is a book on general equilibrium in which firms are allowed to exhibit increasing returns to scale (more precisely, in which the convexity of production sets is not assumed). As such, it provides a full fledged general equilibrium model and analyzes the chief questions concerning existence and optimality. Increasing returns is a topic which many economists find it to be simultaneously very imponant, very difficult and very discouraging. It is very important because it refers to a well established technological phenomenon which is essentially incompatible with the functioning of competitive markets. It is very difficult because the standard concepts and tools for the analysis fail (in particular, the supply mappings are not well defined). It is very discouraging because the available models do not seem to solve the basic questions: Normative models where nonconvex firms follow marginal pricing do not achieve efficient outcomes, and positive models cannot incorporate monopolistic competition as a way of defming the behavior of those firms with increasing returns to scale. I would like to think that this monograph will contribute to show that "the increasing returns question" is neither too difficult nor too discouraging. Concerning the difficulty, it will be shown that the analysis can be carried out with essentially the same tools as those applicable to the standard competitive model. As for the relevance of the results available, let me point out the following.
There are two types of tenn structure models in the literature: the equilibrium models and the no-arbitrage models. And there are, correspondingly, two types of interest rate derivatives pricing fonnulas based on each type of model of the tenn structure. The no-arbitrage models are characterized by the work of Ho and Lee (1986), Heath, Jarrow, and Morton (1992), Hull and White (1990 and 1993), and Black, Dennan and Toy (1990). Ho and Lee (1986) invent the no-arbitrage approach to the tenn structure modeling in the sense that the model tenn structure can fit the initial (observed) tenn structure of interest rates. There are a number of disadvantages with their model. First, the model describes the whole volatility structure by a sin gle parameter, implying a number of unrealistic features. Furthennore, the model does not incorporate mean reversion. Black-Dennan-Toy (1990) develop a model along tbe lines of Ho and Lee. They eliminate some of the problems of Ho and Lee (1986) but create a new one: for a certain specification of the volatility function, the short rate can be mean-fteeting rather than mean-reverting. Heath, Jarrow and Morton (1992) (HJM) construct a family of continuous models of the term struc ture consistent with the initial tenn structure data.
1. 1 Rational Expectations and Learning to Become Rational A characteristic feature of dynamic economic models is that, if future states of the economy are uncertain, the expectations of agents mat ter. Producers have to decide today which amount of a good they will produce not knowing what demand will be tomorrow. Consumers have to decide what they spend for consumption today not knowing what prices will prevail tomorrow. Adopting the neo-classical point of view that economic agents are 'rational' in the sense that they behave in their own best interest given their expectations about future states of the ecomomy it is usually assumed that agents are Bayesian deci sion makers. But, as LUCAS points out, there remains an element of indeterminacy: Unfortunately, the general hypothesis that economic agents are Bayesian decision makers has, in many applications, lit tle empirical content: without some way of infering what an agent's subjective view of the future is, this hypothesis is of no help in understanding his behavior. Even psychotic behavior can be (and today, is) understood as "rational", given a sufficiently abnormal view of relevant probabili ties. To practice economics, we need some way (short of psychoanalysis, one hopes) of understanding which decision problem agents are solving. (LucAs (1977, p. 15)) 2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1. 1.
Two features are combined in this book: the analysis of bargaining experiments and the development of axiomatic bargaining theories. Further, a new type of the latter is derived from observations in the former. The author describes bargaining experiments with different economic and ethical frames as well as developing axiomatic approaches to characterize the corresponding bargaining solutions.