Modeling can highlight real-world difficulties

By -
So I'm making a model of agents who might exchange goods. The initial idea is to have utility function for each good they might have or obtain, as well as a present endowment of each good (which may be zero). Now, for an Edgeworth Box, my initial price model, this is easy: we only have two goods, and we know what they are in advance.

But eventually, we would like to have agents discover goods on the market that they know nothing about before encountering a potential seller. So how can they have a utility function for a good before they know it exists? (I have not solved this problem in my model, although I have ideas.)

In fact, this reflects a problem that actual market actors face: how can they know how much they want of, or what price to pay for, a good they have never encountered before? As my mentor Israel Kirzner has noted, markets inherently involve discovery.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more