This award provides support to Dr. Jeffrey S. Banks under the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Awards Program. The objective of this program is to provide research support to the Nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified science and engineering personnel for academic and industrial research and teaching. This award will allow the investigator to pursue his research concerning the fundamental structure of collective choice and public institutions. His theoretical, statistical and experimental work on this broad topic spans the disciplines of political science and economics and methodologically ranges across game theory. The main thrust of his current research involves a signaling games approach. Signaling games are two-person sequential-move games in which the first mover possesses information concerning payoffs relevant to the second mover's decision calculus. They can serve as an appropriate framework for the study of a variety of economic interactions in which asymmetric information is available to the participants, among them job market signaling, limit pricing, predatory behavior, and tax auditing. Dr. Banks' early research led to the derivation of well-defined refinements of the sequential equilibrium concept which permits narrowing the focus of attention to a tractable set of strategies. Next, he applied the signaling games framework and the selection criteria to a variety of political economy models including models of agenda control, electoral competition, legislative oversight, and regulatory auditing. He is currently extending his analytic approach to wider classes of incomplete information games which facilitates generalization of previous signaling models to a more dynamic setting. His work is moving toward the development of models which will better mirror the reality of complex substantive issues in political economy. Dr. Banks' excellent technical skills along with his broad vision of the applicability of economic and political concepts offer an important contribution to the development of knowledge about information transmission across electoral, legislative and bureaucratic settings.
