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Here is the bonus question from the final exam in my dynamic optimization class of last semester. It is based on problem 8 Chapter II in Ross’ book Introduction to stochastic dynamic programming. It appears there as guess the optimal policy’ without asking for proof. The question seems very natural, but I couldn’t find any information about it (nor apparently the students). I have a solution but it is tricky and too specific to this problem. I will describe my solution next week but perhaps somebody can show me a better solution or a reference ?

We have two coins, a red one and a green one. When flipped, one lands heads with probability P1 and the other with probability P2. We do not know which coin is the P1 coin. We initially attach probability p to the red coin being the P1 coin. We receive one dollar for each heads and our objective is to maximize the total expected discounted return with discount factor β. Describe the optimal policy, including a proof of optimality.

Bertrand, Cournot and Hotelling was on the menu. In addition to covering the mechanics of computing equilibria, spent time trying to motivate each model. Cournot is, I think, the hardest. The short version of the story I gave was this. Firms choose their capacities/quantities, then go to a middleman (should have said platform, so much sexier these days) who auctions of their joint output via a uniform price auction. Wholesale electricity markets come close to this story, which allows one to use Cournot to convey the idea of supply (demand) reduction and the scandal of the California power markets.

Hotelling is easier to motivate, and is a useful vehicle to illustrate why they should always break’ a model to learn something about it. In the standard Hotelling setup, no reservation price is specified for the buyers. Now, allow the two firms to merge and act like a monopolist. The monopolist’s profit function is unbounded! However, you can still write down a first order condition and solve it. Thus, it is also a useful reminder of the dangers of blindly differentiating and setting to zero.

Contrasted Cournot with Hotelling, for example, the effect on consumer surplus when a merger results in a cost reduction for the merged firm. Also provided an opportunity to remind the class about monopoly and evaluating consumer surplus.

Concluded the module on imperfect competition by applying what  had been discussed to Amazon vs. Apple vs the publishers. Another opportunity to walk down memory lane with double marginalization and then add a wrinkle involving competition in the downstream market.

Nicolas Copernicus’s de Revolutionibus, in which he advocated his theory that Earth revolved ar ound the sun, was first printed just before Copernicus’ death in 1543. It therefore fell on one Andreas Osiander to write the introduction. Here is a passage from the introduction:

[An astronomer] will adopt whatever suppositions enable [celestial] motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as for the past…. These hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough.

In other words, the purpose of the astronomer’s study is to capture the observed phenomena — to provide an analytic framework by which we can explain and predict what we see when we look at the sky. It turns out that it is more convenient to capture the phenomena by assuming that Earth revolved around the sun than by assuming, as the Greek astronomers did, a geo-centric epicyclical planet motion. Therefore let’s calculate the right time for Easter by making this assumption. As astronomers, we shouldn’t care whether this is actually true.

Whether or not Copernicus would have endorsed this approach is disputable. What is certain is that his book was at least initially accepted by the Catholic Church whose astronomers have used Copernicus’ model to develop the Gregorian Calendar. (Notice I said the word model btw, which is probably anachronistic but, I think, appropriately captures Osiander’s view). The person who caused the scandal was Galileo Galilei, who famously declared that if earth behaves as if it moves around the sun then, well, it moves around the sun. Yet it moves. It’s not a model, it’s reality. Physicists’ subject matter is the nature, not models about nature.

What about economists ? Econ theorists at least don’t usually claim that the components of their modeling of economic agents (think utilities, beliefs, discount factors, ambiguity aversions) correspond to any real elements of the physical world or of the cognitive process that the agent performs. When we say that Adam’s utility from apple is log(c) we don’t mean that Adam knows anything about logs. We mean — wait for it — that he behaves as if this is his utility, or, as Osiander would have put it, this utility provides a calculus consistent with the observations, and that alone is enough.

The contrast between theoretical economists’ as if’ approach and physicists’ and yet it moves’ approach is not as sharp as I would like it to be. First, from the physics side, modern interpretations of quantum physics view it, and by extension the entire physics enterprise, as nothing more than a computational tool to produce predictions. On the other hand, from the economics side, while I think it is still customary to pay lip service to the as if’ orthodoxy at least in decision theory classes, I don’t often hear it in seminars. And when neuro-economists claim to localize the decision making process in the brain they seem to view the components of the model as more than just mathematical constructions.

Yep, I am advertising another paper. Stay tuned :)

Uber posts a price ${p}$ per ride and keeps a commission ${\alpha}$ on the price. Suppose Uber is the only ride matching service in town. If ${D(p)}$ is the demand function for rides at per ride price ${p}$ and ${S(w)}$ is the supply curve for drivers at wage ${w}$ per ride, Uber must choose ${\alpha}$ and ${p}$ to solve the following:

$\displaystyle \max_{\alpha, p} \alpha p D(p)$

subject to

$\displaystyle D(p) \leq S((1-\alpha)p)$

The last constraint comes from the assumption that Uber is committed to ensuring that every rider seeking a ride at the posted price gets one.

Suppose, Uber did not link the payment to driver to the price charged to rider in this particular way. Then, Uber would solve

$\displaystyle \max_{p,w} pD(p) - wS(w)$

subject to

$\displaystyle D(p) \leq S(w)$

The first optimization problem is clearly more restrictive than the second. Hence, the claim that Uber is not profit maximizing. Which raises the obvious puzzle, why is Uber using a revenue sharing scheme?

Sydney Afriat arrived in Purdue in the late 60’s with a Bentley in tow. Mort Kamien described him as having walked out of the pages of an Ian Flemming novel. Why he brought the Bentley was a puzzle, as there were no qualified mechanics as far as the eye could see. In Indiana, that is a long way. Afriat would take his Bentley on long drives only to be interrupted by mechanical difficulties that necessitated the Bentley being towed to wait for parts or specialized help.

I came upon Afriat when I learnt about the problem of rationalizability.  One has a model of choice and a collection of observations about what an agent selected. Can one rationalize the observed choices by the given model of choice? In Afriat’s seminal paper on the subject, the observations consisted of price-quantity pairs for a vector of goods and a budget. The goal was to determine if the observed choices were consistent with an agent maximizing a concave utility function subject to the budget constraint. Afriat’s paper has prompted many other papers asking the same question for different models of choice. There is an aspect of these papers, including Afriat’s, that I find puzzling.

To illustrate, consider rationalizing expected utility (Eran Shmaya suggested that expected consumption’ might be more accurate). Let ${S = \{1,2 \ldots, n\}}$ be the set of possible states. We are given a sequence of observations ${\{x^{i},p^{i}\}_{i=1}^{m}}$ and a single budget ${b}$. Here ${x^i_j}$ represents consumption in state ${j}$ and ${p^i_j}$ is the unit price of consumption in state ${j}$ in observation ${i}$. We want to know if there is a probability distribution over states, ${v=(v_{1},...,v_{n})}$, such that each ${(x^i, p^i)}$ maximizes expected utility. In other words, ${(x^i, p^i)}$ solves

$\displaystyle \max \sum_{j=1}^{n}v_{j}x^i_{j}$

subject to

$\displaystyle \sum_{j=1}^{n}p^i_{j}x_{j}\leq b$

$\displaystyle x^i_{j}\geq 0\,\,\forall j \in S$

The solution to the above program is obvious. Identify the variable with the largest objective coefficient to constraint ratio and make it as large as possible. It is immediate that a collection of observations ${\{x^{i},p^{i}\}_{i=1}^{m}}$ can be rationalized by a suitable set ${\{v_{j}\} _{j=1}^{n}}$ of non-zero and nonnegative ${v_{j}}$‘s if the following system has a feasible solution:

$\displaystyle \frac{v_{r}}{p^i_r}\geq \frac{v_{j}}{p^i_{j}} \,\,\forall j, \,\, x^i_r> 0$

$\displaystyle \sum_{j \in S}v_{j}=1$

$\displaystyle v_{j}\geq 0\,\,\forall j \in S$

This completes the task as formulated by Afriat. A system of inequalities has been identified, that if feasible means the given observations can be rationalized. How hard is this to do in other cases? As long as the model of choice involves optimization and the optimization problem is well behaved in that first order conditions, say, suffice to characterize optimality, its a homework exercise. One can do this all day, thanks to Afriat; concave, additively separable concave, etc. etc.

Interestingly, no rationalizability paper stops at the point of identifying the inequalities. Even Afriat’s paper goes a step farther and proceeds to characterize’ when the observations can be rationalized. But, feasibility of the inequalities themselves is just such a characterization. What more is needed?

Perhaps, the characterization involving inequalities lacks interpretation’. Or, if the given system for a set of observations was infeasible, we may be interested in the obstacle to feasibility. Afriat’s paper gave a characterization in terms of the strong axiom of revealed preference, i.e., an absence of cycles of certain kinds. But that is precisely the Farkas alternative to the system of inequalities identified in Afriat. The absence of cycles condition follows from the fact that the initial set of inequalities is associated with the problem of finding a shortest path (see the chapter on rationalizability in my mechanism design book). Let me illustrate with the example above. It is equivalent to finding a non-negative and non trivial solution to

$\displaystyle \frac{v_{r}}{v_j}\geq \frac{p^i_{r}}{p^i_{j}} \,\,\forall j, \,\, x^i_r> 0$

Take logs:

$\displaystyle \ln{v_r} - \ln{v_j} \geq \ln{\frac{p^i_{r}}{p^i_{j}}} \,\,\forall j, \,\, x^i_r> 0$

This is exactly the dual to the problem of finding a shortest path in a suitable network (I believe that Afriat has a paper, that I’ve not found, which focuses on systems of the form $b_{rs} >$ $x_s - x_r$ ).The cycle characterization would involve products of terms like ${\frac{p^i_{r}}{p^i_{j}}}$ being less than 1 (or greater than 1 depending on convention). So, what would this add?

Completed what I wanted about monopoly and launched into imperfect competition and introduced the nash equilibrium. I follow the set up in the chapter of pricing from my pricing book with Lakshman Krishnamurthi. The novelty, if any, is to start with Bertrand competition, add capacity and then differentiation. I do this to highlight the different forces at play so that they are not obscured by the algebra of identifying reaction functions and finding where they cross. We’ll get to those later on. Midterm Day, 12. I am, as Enoch Powell once remarked in another, unattractive context,

…. filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.

Much of my energy has been taken up with designing homework problems and a midterm exam on monopoly. Interesting questions are hard to come by. Those lying around make me want to make gnaw my feet off. I started with the assumption, which I may live to regret, that my students are capable of the mechanical and have good memories. The goal, instead, is to get them to put what they have learnt in class to use. Here is an example. Two upstream suppliers, A and B, who each supply an input to a Retailer. The Retailer is characterized by a production function that tells you how much output it generates from the inputs supplied by A and B as well as a demand curve for the final product. Fix the price set by B to, w, say. Now compute the price that A should charge to maximize profit. Its double marginalization with a twist. Suppose the inputs are substitutes for each other. If B raises its price above w what effect will that have on A’s profits? There are two effects. The retailers costs will go up of course, so reducing its output. However, A will retain a larger share of the smaller output. Which will be bigger? Its a question that requires them to put various pieces together. I’ve had them work up to it by solving the various pieces under different guises in different problems. Am I expecting too much? I’ll find out after the midterm. Yet, I cannot see anyway around having questions like this. What is the point of the mathematics we require them to use and know if we don’t ask them to apply it when blah-blah alone is insufficient?

I now have a modest store of such problems, but coming up with them has been devilish hard. Working out the solutions is painful, because it involves actual algebra and one cannot afford errors (on that account I’m behind the curve). To compound matters, one is unable to recycle the exam and homework problems given various sharing sites. I begin to regret not making them do just algebra.

Finally, if too late. It was announced October 3rd. For more on Blackwell see this post or the special GEB issue.

Its all the rage. I’m not immune to jumping on a bandwagon, but by the time I get there the dogs have barked and the caravan has moved on. Is there anything new to be said on the subject? Perhaps we can get by with relabeling things we already know? Useful, but not exciting. To think about this I tried to come with questions about privacy that struck me as important. Here is my list, in hopes that it will prompt others to improve upon it.
1) Is the concern for privacy intrinsic or instrumental?

The question matters because an answer would have a profound impact on how one evaluates the welfare consequences of various policies.

2) Property rights over information.

Much of the information about us that is of interest is the result of interactions with others. When I purchase a book from Amazon, who owns’ the record of that transaction? It could be argued that the record of the transaction is as much Amazon’s as it is mine. The question is not new. It arises, for example, when one writes a biography.

What about when a transaction takes place via an intermediary? What rights does the intermediary have to the record of the transaction?

3) A full specification of property rights would spell out who has the right to disclose what and to whom and under what conditions.

Some of this will involve a balance between the public good and individual harm. Out of court settlements regarding commercial matters whose terms are secret, prevent learning about systemic problems (Akerlof and his lemons, seems like a likely candidate for relabeling).

When is and under what conditions is mandated disclosure warranted? One can also imagine settings where one might wish to prohibit the voluntary disclosure of confidential information. Some professional schools, for example prohibit the disclosure of grades to potential employers (Grossman and Milgrom, anyone?).

4) Compliance. How might one monitor and verify that the specification of property rights have been adhered to?

For example, a promise not to disclose to a third party. In a given setting, are some kinds of promises even feasible? One may promise not to use certain identifying characteristics in the allocation of resources but those characteristics may have good proxies in other allowed’ characteristics.

Who should bear the costs of such monitoring? (Coase?)As much information of interest is collected by devices, one might think about the `regulation’ of devices as a part of compliance. What standards, if any should devices that collect and transmit information adhere to? Is managing privacy best done through device standards or contracts?