Organizations with incomplete information : essays in economic analysis : a tribute to Roy Radner

There have been systematic attempts over the last twenty-five years to explore the implications of decision making with incomplete information and to model an 'economic man' as an information-processing organism. These efforts are associated with the work of Roy Radner, who joins other analysts in this collection to offer accessible overviews of the existing literature on topics such as Walrasian equilibrium with incomplete markets, rational expectations equilibrium, learning, Markovian games, dynamic game-theoretic models of organization, and experimental work on mechanism selection. Some essays also take up relatively new themes related to bounded rationality, complexity of decisions, and economic survival. The collection overall introduces models that add to the toolbox of economists, expand the boundaries of economic analysis, and enrich our understanding of the inefficiencies and complexities of organizational design in the presence of uncertainty. There have been systematic attempts over the last twenty-five years to explore the implications of decision making with incomplete information and to model an "economic man" as an information processing organism. These efforts are associated with the work of Roy Radner, who joins other analysts in this collection to offer accessible overviews of the existing literature on topics such as Walrasian equilibrium with incomplete markets, rational expectations equilibrium, learning, Markovian games, dynamic game-theoretic models of organization, and experimental work on mechanism selection. Some essays also take up relatively new themes related to bounded rationality, complexity of decisions, and economic survival. The collection overall introduces models that add to the toolbox of economists, expand the boundaries of economic analysis, and enrich our understanding of the inefficiencies and complexities of organizational design in the presence of uncertainty. Introduction : Searching For Paradigms / Mukul Majumdar -- Equilibrium With Incomplete Markets In A Sequence Economy / Wayne Shafer -- The Existence Of Rational Expectations Equilibrium : A Retrospective / Beth Allen And James S. Jordan -- Rational Expectations And Rational Learning / Lawrence E. Blume And David Easley -- Dynamic Games In Organization Theory / Roy Radner -- The Equilibrium Existence Problem In General Markovian Games / Prajit K. Dutta And Rangarajan K. Sundaram -- A Practical Person's Guide To Mechanism Selection : Some Lessons From Experimental Economics / Andrew Schotter -- Organizations With An Endogenous Number Of Information Processing Agents / Timothy Van Zandt -- A Modular Network Model Of Bounded Rationality / Kenneth R. Mount And Stanley Reiter. Edited By Mukul Majumdar. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. This collection contains essays that provide definitive and accessible accounts of recent research on some of the most important topics in the theory of decision-making and organization-design with incomplete information. Aimed primarily at nonspecialists, some of the essays indicate the limitations of accepted paradigms and suggest directions of future research. Graduate students contemplating careers in economic theory will find the volume a particularly stimulating source of research topics. It can also serve as an item on the reading list of courses on advanced microeconomic theory, information theory, game theory and organization theory. In the now classical extension of the general competitive model to include time and uncertainty, it was observed that if at time 0 (today) there are markets for future delivery of all goods contingent on the date and state of nature, then the resulting equilibrium allocation will be Pareto efficient.