This grant provides partial assistance with travel expenses of participants in the annual Summer Workshops on Economic Theory conducted each summer by the Stanford Institute of Theoretical Economics (SITE). This six-week collection of workshops brings together prominent scholars as well as younger economists for presentation and discussion of their current research. This workshop series is now in its 29th year and continues to serve as an international forum for the study of innovative topics in economic theory and mathematical economics. Stanford University provides full administrative support and facilities for the program. Some topics considered for inclusion in the 1999 workshops such as general equilibrium, are long-term interests of SITE. Others, such as empirical work based on theoretical models, computational methods, and issues in local public finance, represent new directions that SITE has taken in recent years and expects to continue in future years.
General equilibrium models continue to be of great importance and interest in economic theory, and are frequently used in other fields, such as public economics and macroeconomics. Originally Arrow and Debreu considered competitive markets for a complete set of state contingent commodities, and symmetric information. This is an unrealistic description of actual market economies that explains the continuing interest in incomplete markets. SITE's aim is to encourage research that seeks theoretical explanations of market incompleteness, without which we lack a proper framework for analyzing the effects of policies designed to remedy the consequent inefficiencies. Computation is playing an increasingly important role in economic analysis. Economists and mathematicians are developing algorithms to compute equilibria of increasingly complex economic models.
SITE has selected computational theory and practice for special emphasis because it is an increasingly active field in mathematical economics. For example, solution methods for dynamic stochastic competitive equilibrium models were developed; methods from the numerical functional literature are being applied to dynamic models, algorithms for convergence and errors have been evaluated; and there is also active work on computational methods for dynamic economies with many agents.
