Olivier Compte

PSE Chaired Professor

Website RePEc page
  • Ingénieur général des Ponts, des Eaux et des Forêts
  • Ecole des Ponts – ParisTech
Research groups
Research themes
  • Bounded rationality
  • Game Theory
  • Mechanism Design and Economics of Contract
Contact

Address :48 Boulevard Jourdan,
75014 Paris, France

Campus: Campus Jourdan
Floor: 6
Office: 54
Declaration of interest

Publications HAL

  • Consensus and Disagreement: Information Aggregation under (Not So) Naive Learning Journal article

    We explore a model of non-Bayesian information aggregation in networks. Agents noncooperatively choose among Friedkin-Johnsen-type aggregation rules to maximize payoffs. The DeGroot rule is chosen in equilibrium if and only if there is noiseless information transmission, leading to consensus. With noisy transmission, while some disagreement is inevitable, the optimal choice of rule amplifies the disagreement: even with little noise, individuals place substantial weight on their own initial opinion in every period, exacerbating the disagreement. We use this framework to think about equilibrium versus socially efficient choice of rules and its connection to polarization of opinions across groups.
    Journal: Journal of Political Economy

    Published in

  • Markets and Allotments: Bundling or Unbundling? Journal article

    We consider the issue of allotment design: goods are divisible and may be cut into various possibly heterogeneous lots. We investigate conditions under which it is preferable from the seller’s perspective to create two or more lots out of an initial one, or to group various initial lots into a single one. We identify two effects. De-grouping always increases efficiency of the final allocation. Nevertheless, it modifies asymmetries across bidders, and this may possibly end up hurting the seller. We examine the applications to procurement for cash flow management services, and to auctions for commercial links or space on internet.
    Journal: Revue Economique

    Published in

  • Markets and Allotments: Bundling or Unbundling ? Journal article

    We consider the issue of allotment design: goods are divisible and may be cut into various possibly heterogeneous lots. We investigate conditions under which it is preferable from the seller’s perspective to create two or more lots out of an initial one, or to group various initial lots into a single one. We identify two effects. De-grouping always increases efficiency of the final allocation. Nevertheless, it modifies asymmetries across bidders, and this may possibly end up hurting the seller. We examine the applications to procurement for cash flow management services, and to auctions for commercial links or space on internet.
    Journal: Revue Economique

    Published in

  • Plausible cooperation Journal article

    There is a large repeated games literature illustrating how future interactions provide incentives for cooperation. Much of the earlier literature assumes public monitoring. Departures from public monitoring to private monitoring that incorporate differences in players’ observations may dramatically complicate coordination and the provision of incentives, with the consequence that equilibria with private monitoring often seem unrealistically complex or fragile. We set out a model in which players accomplish cooperation in an intuitively plausible fashion. Players process information via a mental system – a set of psychological states and a transition function between states depending on observations. Players restrict attention to a relatively small set of simple strategies, and consequently, might learn which perform well.
    Journal: Games and Economic Behavior

    Published in

All publications

Tabs

  • Education : Ecole Polytechnique, 1984-87 ; Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, 1987-89 ;  Ph. D Stanford, 1994: “Private Observations, Communications and Coordination in Repeated Games”
  • Employer : Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées (since 1994), Economic Theory Chair at Paris School of Economics (PSE)
  • Research : auctions, bargaining, repeated games, economics and psychology, bounded rationality, decision theory
  • Teaching (currently) Game theory (M1, APE), Bounded rationality and behavioral economics (M2, APE)
  • Editorial work: Journal of Economic Theory (associate editor), Theoretical Economics (associate editor)