NYU Paris Director and Courant Professor Alfred Galichon was recently awarded a substantial grant from the European Commission for a research project on dynamic pricing at the intersection of economics, mathematics, and computer science. This prestigious award is very competitive and this will be a five-year project. Professor Galichon applied for the grant through Sciences Po, one of NYU Paris’s partner institutions, and is sole Principal Investigator on the project. Therefore many activities related to the project will be done in collaboration with NYU.
Professor Galichon’s award demonstrates that you can keep researching at the highest level while being a site director. His access to this opportunity was only possible due to his presence in Paris, which is wonderful both for NYU Courant and NYU Paris.
Here are some further details about the project:
This project seeks to build an innovative economic toolbox (ranging from modelling, computation, inference, and empirical applications) for the study of equilibrium models with gross substitutes, with applications to models of matching with or without transfers, trade flows on networks, multinomial choice models, as well as hedonic and dynamic pricing models. While under-emphasized in general equilibrium theory, equilibrium models with gross substitutes are very relevant to these problems as each of these problems can be recast as such.
Thus far, almost any tractable empirical model of these problems typically required making the strong assumption of quasi-linear utilities, leading to a predominance of models with transferable utility in applied work. The current project seeks to develop a new paradigm to move beyond the transferable utility framework to the imperfectly transferable utility one, where the agent’s utilities are no longer quasi-linear.
The mathematical structure of gross substitutes will replace the structure of convexity underlying in models with transferable utility.
To investigate this class of models, one builds a general framework embedding all the models described above, the “equilibrium flow problem.” The gross substitute property is properly generalized and properties (existence of an equilibrium, uniqueness, lattice structure) are derived. Computational algorithms that rely on gross substitutability are designed and implemented. The econometrics of the problem is addressed (estimation, inference, model selection). Applications to various fields such as labor economics, family economics, international trade, urban economics, industrial organization, etc. are investigated.
The project touches upon other disciplines. It will propose new ideas in applied mathematics, offer new algorithms of interest in computer science and machine learning, and provide new methods in other social sciences (like sociology, demography and geography).
For more information about Professor Galichon’s work or this project, please visit his website
here.
NYU Paris Director and Courant Professor Alfred Galichon was recently awarded a substantial grant from the European Commission for a research project on dynamic pricing at the intersection of economics, mathematics, and computer science. This prestigious award is very competitive and this will be a five-year project. Professor Galichon applied for the grant through Sciences Po, one of NYU Paris’s partner institutions, and is sole Principal Investigator on the project. Therefore many activities related to the project will be done in collaboration with NYU.