Speaker:     Jack Stecher
Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Title:       Expected Utility and Equilibrium with Subjective Choice Sets and Strategic Reporting
Date:        Monday, 25 Jun 2012
Time:        4:30 pm
Location:    Room 6115, Owen Glenn Building

This paper studies an economy where agents trade using a shared language, so that
they do not need to meet in person with goods physically present. Agents provide
vague descriptions of proposed net trades, which we interpret as arising either from
inherent limitations in what the agents can describe or from strategic presentations of
information. We construct a family of orders over terms in the language, arising from
an individual’s preferences over consumption as subjectively perceived, illustrate the
induced order’s properties, and show the constructive existence of competitive equi-
librium. Finally, we illustrate the relationship between the existence of a competitive
equilibrium obtained in the language and the one that would result from an interaction
involving perceived consumption sets.