Supervision

Some important goods and services are allocated through various mechanisms in situations where fully market-based approaches are impractical or otherwise considered inappropriate. For example, in the UK, local authorities allocate social housing through various mechanisms, which include mechanisms based in various ways on bidding. The rules for these bidding mechanisms vary significantly in the number of houses an applicant can bid for at one time, and the feedback unsuccessful bidders receive. ​​​​​To understand whether these mechanisms are fit for purpose, we need better models of how people choose strategies from among large sets of possibilities, and how those choices are affected by the amount of feedback they receive. Such a model will need to integrate theoretical, behavioural and computational/algorithmic methods. Proposals along these lines are invited to be supervised by Emiliya Lazarova, a theorist with particular expertise in the theory of matching and search under uncertainty, and Theodore Turocy, Director of UEA’s Laboratory for Economic and Decision Research, and Principal Investigator on the Automated Analysis of Strategic Interactions project funded by The Alan Turing Institute.

There are strong reasons to believe that an effective tracking app could have helped to reduce contagion and possibly to shorten or completely avert the month-long lockdowns that were necessary, replacing them by quicker, shorter, and more local lockdowns. However, a major concern in the public debate were privacy concerns and the intrusion to privacy that effective tracking apps would potentially have implied. As a result of this tension, western societies tried to devise privacy-preserving tracking apps and, ultimately, completely failed to set up such apps in an effective way. The economic and psychological consequences of this failure cannot be overestimated. The immediate purpose of this project is to investigate the relationship between privacy concerns in apps and the failure of tracking apps, and whether privacy concerns were a compelling reason for tracking apps to fail. The purpose is to make progress on estimating the value of privacy and devising optimal regulation of privacy sensitive data in the market mobile apps and other data-driven markets. Research Team: you would be working with Dr. Michael Kummer and Prof. Jens Prufer (and possibly other IO economists in the school).

Economic, social, cultural and technical change affect the way information flows between agents, by influencing both information transmission as well as information search incentives. Examples range from online consumer reviews, algorithmic recommendation systems to information sharing on social networks. Big data and information markets is another key novelty. Across various domains, we need a better understanding of key drivers of behaviour relating to information as well as aggregate consequences. Research on this topic could integrate various methodologies, theoretical (standard or behavioural), empirical, experimental, computational. Proposals along these lines are invited to be supervised by Mark Le Quement, a theorist with particular expertise in the theory of information acquisition and transmission, and Arnold Polanski, a theorist with a particular interest in Networks.

Social, information and commercial networks are endemic to economic interactions. For example, in many situations, the social context is the primary driver of behaviours and outcomes. Obvious examples range from the role of social networks in obtaining jobs, which products to buy or how much education to pursue. Similar to behavioural economics, which enriches the modelling of economic decision makers by exploring the psychological underpinnings of human behaviour, economics of networks comes from a realization that a deeper exploration of social, informational or commercial connections among human agents, firms and countries can enrich the modelling of economic interactions. Across various domains, we need a better understanding of key drivers of behaviour relating to the embeddedness in relevant networks and the impact of the latter on individual and aggregate outcomes. Research on this topic could integrate various methodologies, theoretical (standard or behavioural), empirical, experimental, computational (e.g., artificial intelligence). Proposals along these lines are invited to be supervised by Arnold Polanski, a theorist with a particular interest in networks and Mark Le Quement, a theorist with particular expertise in the theory of information acquisition and transmission.