The National Science Foundation sent out a “Dear Colleague letter” some time ago requesting white papers on grand challenges in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, and has now published those received. I find a non-trivial number of them to be of interest to the Algorithmic Game Theory/Economics community:
- Robustness and Fragility of Markets: Research at the Interface of Economics and Computer Science by Lawrence Blume
- Market Design: Harnessing Market Methods to Improve Resource Allocation by Peter Cramton
- Predictive Game Theory by Drew Fudenberg
- The Economics of Digitization: An Agenda for NSF by Shane Greenstein, Josh Lerner, and Scott Stern
- Research Opportunities in the Study of Social and Economic Networks by Matthew O. Jackson
- Virtual Model Validation for Economics by David K. Levine
- Market Design: Understanding markets well enough to fix them when they’re broken by Alvin E. Roth
ht: Market Design
Very interesting link. Thanks for pointing to it !
I agree with Prof. Levine that what Economics lacks is model validation. That´s the biggest problem of Economic sciences and i do not think this problem has an easy solution, though virtual validation might be a possible one.
I suppose he agrees that this lack of model validation includes his own “Against monopoly” model for IP. As it is known here the regulator has taken decisions regarding the two main controlled variables (patent scope and time) based on unknown validation of a at least one current theory (optimal patent theory).
Limited scope and 20 years applied linearly to all kind of patents might not be the best policy and in this field there is room for experiment: just enlarge the time in some kind of patents (for instance energy a field where great innovations are needed, or supercomputing a field were USA is loosing its position) and see how agents / market reacts…
Now i will read the whole NSF doc !
After reading all the materials in diagonal at first it seemed to me a quite heterogeneous sample but thinking about it in deep i see the material can be synthetized in a few words: theory test, multidisciplinary convergence and interconnected dynamics.
Some conributions stresses on the methodological, some on the substantial side of economics.
Those contributions that stress on the methodological side focus on the “forget mathematical elegance and test your theory with reality”. This leads to the desire of improvement of economic data, experimentation, simulation and the complexification of economic models (from the homogeneous independent agent dealing with homogeneous goods to the heterogeneous networked agent dealing with heterogeneous goods).
Those that stress on the substantial side focus on multidisciplinary convergence: the economic cycle is entangled with the reproductive, political and knowledge cycle and must be studied as such. This leads to the interest in the study of social institutions and its products, culture and the way they are entangled and of markets different from the usual commodity markets.
This substantial structural view is complemented with a interconnected dynamics: how societies can go from underdevelopped to developped and keep itself in this desirable state ? My favourite contribution, the one from Nordhaus (by coincidence the author of the optimal patent theory if i´m not wrong) speaks about the ending point of this dynamics: how to construct a politicaly global society.
In all very good contributions.
[…] Challenges in Economics, here from Turing’s Invisible hand […]