Marina Agranov, Sixth-year PhD student, Department of Economics

I have been trained as both an economic theorist and an experimentalist under the supervision of Professors Andrew Schotter and Andrew Caplin. My primary interests lie in combining theory and experiments to study how institutions affect credible transmission of information. More precisely, my research has explored signaling games with asymmetric information in the context of elections and announcements games. In one paper, I develop a model of a two-stage election in a two-party system, in which candidates must obtain their party's nomination before competing in the general election. This model predicts a number of well-documented empirical patterns, such as a post-primary moderation effect and a divisive primary hypothesis. It also provides a new testable implication, according to which high-intensity primaries and high-intensity general elections have the opposite effects on candidate selection.

The other line of research I am interested in investigates the vagueness property of natural language. In two papers, both joint with Andrew Schotter, we study the efficiency of using natural language (words) with that of precise and ambiguous messages. We show experimentally that under the proper circumstances communication in words is not efficiency-decreasing. It is, however, essential that agents using a language reach a common understanding of what words mean if they are going to be successful in achieving efficient payoffs. The second paper highlights one advantage of using a vague language: vagueness may mask inequality. That is, in situations where payoff inequality is likely to interfere with coordination as in the Battle of the Sexes Game, being vague about the game being played and its payoff inequality hides this inequality and restores the power of focal strategies, which increase coordination.

Economics often studies the outcomes of interactions between agents. However, by studying the process of decision-making (as opposed to studying the final choice only), we can understand the mechanisms that govern decision-making and ultimately improve the predictive power of economic theory. This is the primary reason I became interested in Neuroeconomics. My first introduction to this field was through the Stanford Summer Institute of Neuroeconomics of 2007. This summer school combined faculty and students in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and economics. The similarities in the questions studied by these disciplines are striking. The methodologies to address these questions are, however, different. In my research, I have tried to use the complementarities of these three fields to better understand the process of decision-making and strategic interaction between agents. In this line of research I am currently working on a project that designs a non-standard choice experiment together with the axiomatic-based theory in order to better understand sequential search.