Essays in economic theory

[摘要] This thesis is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 considers the existence of equilibria in games with complete information, where players may have non-ordered and discontinuous preferences. Chapter 2 studies the issues on the existence of pure and behavioral strategy equilibria in games with incomplete information and discontinuous payoffs. We consider the standard setting with Bayesian preferences as well as the case in which players may face ambiguity. Chapter 3 extends the classical results on the Walras-core existence and equivalence to an ambiguous asymmetric information economy, where agents maximize maximin expected utilities (MEU). These results are based on the papers He and Yannelis (2014, 2015a,b,c, 2016a,b). In the first chapter, we propose the condition of continuous inclusion property to handle the difficulty of discontinuous payoffs in various general equilibrium and game theory models. Such discontinuities arise naturally in economic situations, including auction, price competition of firms and also patent races. Based on the continuous inclusion property, we establish the equilibrium existence result in a very general framework with discontinuous payoffs. On one hand, this condition is sufficiently general from the methodological point of view, as it unifies almost all special conditions proposed in the literature. On the other hand, our condition is also potentially useful from the realistic point of view, as it could be applied to deal with many economic models which cannot be studied before because of the presence of the discontinuity. In the second chapter, I study the existence problem of pure and behavioral strategy equilibria in discontinuous games with incomplete information. The framework of games with incomplete information is standard as in the literature, except for that we allow players' payoffs to be discontinuous. We illustrate by examples that the Bayesian equilibria may not exist in such games and the previous results are not applicable to handle this problem. We propose some general conditions to retain the existence of both pure strategy and behavioral strategy Bayesian equilibrium, and show that our condition is tight. In addition, we study the equilibrium existence problem in discontinuous games under incomplete information and ambiguity, and show that the maximin framework solves the equilibrium existence issue without introducing any additional condition. In the last chapter, I study a general equilibrium model with incomplete information by adopting the maximin expected utilities. The model is powerful enough to describe the behaviors of risk averse agents that cannot be explained by the standard assumption

[发布机构] University of Iowa