Organization with Incomplete Information Essays in Economic Analysis: A Tribute to Roy Radner

This collection contains essays that provide definitive and accessible accounts of recent research on some of the most important topics in the theory of decision-making and organization-design with incomplete information. Aimed primarily at nonspecialists, some of the essays indicate the limitations of accepted paradigms and suggest directions of future research. Graduate students contemplating careers in economic theory will find the volume a particularly stimulating source of research topics. It can also serve as an item on the reading list of courses on advanced microeconomic theory, information theory, game theory and organization theory.

There have been systematic attempts over the last twenty-five years to explore the implications of decision making with incomplete information and to model an 'economic man' as an information-processing organism. These efforts are associated with the work of Roy Radner, who joins other analysts in this collection to offer accessible overviews of the existing literature on topics such as Walrasian equilibrium with incomplete markets, rational expectations equilibrium, learning, Markovian games, dynamic game-theoretic models of organization, and experimental work on mechanism selection. Some essays also take up relatively new themes related to bounded rationality, complexity of decisions, and economic survival. The collection overall introduces models that add to the toolbox of economists, expand the boundaries of economic analysis, and enrich our understanding of the inefficiencies and complexities of organizational design in the presence of uncertainty.

Introduction: searching for paradigms Mukul Majumdar; 1. Equilibrium with incomplete markets in a sequence economy Wayne Shafer; 2. The existence of rational expectations equilibrium: a retrospective Beth Allen and James S. Jordan; 3. Rational expectations and rational learning Lawrence E. Blume and David Easley; 4. Dynamic games in organizational theory Roy Radner; 5. The equilibrium existence problem in general Markovian games Prajit Dutta and Rangarajan Sundaram; 6. A practical person's guide to mechanism selection: some lesson from experimental economics Andrew Schotter; 7. Organizations with an endogenous number of information processing agents Timothy Van Zandt; 8. A modular network model of bounded rationality Kenneth R. Mount and Stanley Reiter.

This collection contains essays that provide definitive and accessible accounts of recent research on some of the most important topics in the theory of decision-making and organization-design with incomplete information. Aimed primarily at non-specialists, some of the essays indicate the limitations of accepted paradigms and suggest directions of future research.