Seminar

The first department seminar of the semester will take place Friday, February 8th at 3:30 pm in room 230 Wimberly. Our guest speaker will be Jarod Hart, an economics and math major here at UWL. Jarod received a UWL undergraduate research grant for this research, which he also presented at the national undergraduate research conference last fall. Please encourage your upper division students to attend and support one of our home grown scholars. We will serve pizza and soda at an informal social immediately following the seminar. I look forward to seeing all of you there.

Jarod will be presenting: Strategic Market Games with Bayesian Learning
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barb Bennie

We study a game theoretic economic model involving symmetric agents who compete by bidding to purchase goods in a series of stages. The production of the good is assumed to be from an unknown distribution. Each agent bids according to the Nash equilibrium strategy that incorporates the history of observed production. As more information is obtained, the agents learn more about the unknown distribution by way of Bayesian learning. We compare the expected inflation rate for each stage to the infation rate when the production distribution is known, which is established by the Fisher equation. When the production distribution is unknown, the expected inflation deviates from results of the Fisher equation. Although as more is learned about the unknown distribution over time, the expected infation converges to the infation rate determined by the Fisher equation.