Philippe Jehiel, ERC laureate for his new project

Philippe Jehiel, PSE Associate Chair and Ecole des Ponts - ParisTech Engineer, is a new ERC Laureate for his research project “Learning through categories in social and economic interactions” (2017-2021). In 2008-2013, he received another ERC advanced grant funding for the project “Game theory and applications in the presence of cognitive limitations”.

Abstract

There is growing evidence that economic agents are less sophisticated in forming their expectations than mainstream economic models assume. Allowing for richer models of expectation formation is of vital importance not only from a methodological viewpoint but also to improve our understanding of complex socio-economic phenomena such as bubbles, herd behaviour, social trust, deception or why citizens think their vote can make a difference in large elections.
Philippe Jehiel and co-authors postulate that agents form their expectations by bundling data that come from multiple situations and reason as if the coarse statistics so obtained could safely be used to describe each situation accurately. The ERC project proposes putting structure on how data are bundled taking inspirations from different fields including econometrics, linguistics or social psychology. It aims at exploring the consequences of such forms of categorical reasoning in various applications. A common theme that will be spread over the various applications is whether such imperfections in data processing can explain well documented behavioural anomalies such as overconfidence in entrepreneurship, the tendency for reciprocal fairness even in non-repeated interactions or the euphoria of speculators in boom periods. Experimental tests will complement the theoretical investigations.

More about this new ERC Project

Download the extended Synopsis of the scientific proposal