YINS Distinguished Lecturer: Stephen E. Morris
“Information, Networks and Contagion”
Speaker: Stephen E. Morris
Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics at Princeton University
The Kumho Visiting Professor to the Yale Department of Economics for the 2018 spring semester
Talk summary: Talk will cover an old paper and a recent paper
In both games of incomplete information and network, behavior can spread contagiously: a small probability event or a small set of players can determine global play of the game. The talk will present a unified approach to understand incomplete information and network contagion and discuss a number of applications. For one application, we show that strong ties make contagion occur more robustly (i.e., for a wider set of payoffs) but slower.
Speaker bio: Stephen Morris, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics at Princeton University, will be the Kumho Visiting Professor to the Yale Department of Economics for the 2018 spring semester. He is, a faculty member of the Princeton Department of Economics, the founding and current director of the William S. Dietrich Economic Theory Center, and an affiliate of the Bendheim Center of Finance and the Research Program in Political Economy. His research focuses on foundations and applications of game theory and mechanism design, specifically, the role of incomplete information. Applications include finance, auctions, macroeconomics and political economy. Morris received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1991 and was previously a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University before going to Princeton. He is a former Sloan Research Fellow, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as editor of Econometrica from 2007-2011 and is currently the First Vice-President of Econometric Society. While visiting Yale, Morris will co-teach the Advanced Microeconomic Theory: II (ECON 421b) course with Juuso Välimäki and Marina Halac, and is schedule to present at the Cowles Lunch on February 21.
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