On the basis of 2018 call evaluations, Dr. Kemal Yıldız from Economics department has been awarded MSCA global fellowship grant for three years. This global fellowship project will be jointly carried out in Bilkent University and Princeton University.
Memory limitations lie at the core of how agents store past experiences and make decisions. For example, consider a buyer choosing between two alternative brands of a good. In thinking about a brand, she may recall her past experiences, product reviews, or expert’s ratings, which induce a belief about the brand’s quality. In this process, the buyer may divide the quality scale into three categories such as high, medium, and low. Then, she may switch from one brand to another only if her belief about a brand’s quality moves from one category to another. Although memory limitations in the form of finite memory naturally arise in many facets of economic life, formal economic models that incorporate the finite memory restriction are rather limited. The aim of this project is to understand the implications of finite memory for dynamic decision problems in both choice theoretical and strategic economic contexts. These implications are significant to reach out a wide range of objectives such as better understanding of agents’ choices, unravelling the observed choice patterns, and regulating markets as to maximize social welfare.
The major theoretical questions of interest are:
• What is the relation between the equilibrium and efficiency?
• What are the characteristics of the equilibrium pricing strategies?
• What are the implications of asymmetric memory sizes on choice and equilibrium behavior?