Robert E. Hall – författare

In Deal Engines, leading economist Robert E. Hall explains the underlying principles of auctions and provides sweeping insight for anyone curious to understand and exploit them. Drawing on decades of research that includes Nobel Prize-winning discoveries, Hall explains that how you set up a market has a lot to do with the deals that result. Moving from examples as straightforward as shopping for a car to others as complex as the mechanisms of stock exchanges, he describes the various types of deal engines that can be used to conduct transactions, including auctions, real-time exchanges, and posted-price sales engines. Hall analyzes the qualities of the markets these deal engines give rise to, with an eye to practical outcomes, and provides invaluable information and guidance to everyone from entrepreneurs working on a business plan to buyers on eBay. Originally published in hardcover under the title Digital Dealing.

Individuals and families make key decisions that impact many aspects of financial stability and determine the future of the economy. These decisions involve balancing current sacrifice against future benefits. People have to decide how much to invest in health care, exercise, their diet, and insurance. They must decide how much debt to take on, and how much to save. And they make choices about jobs that determine employment and unemployment levels. Forward-Looking Decision Making is about modeling this individual or family-based decision making using an optimizing dynamic programming model. Robert Hall first reviews ideas about dynamic programs and introduces new ideas about numerical solutions and the representation of solved models as Markov processes. He surveys recent research on the parameters of preferences--the intertemporal elasticity of substitution, the Frisch elasticity of labor supply, and the Frisch cross-elasticity. He then examines dynamic programming models applied to health spending, long-term care insurance, employment, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and consumer debt.Linking theory with data and applying them to real-world problems, Forward-Looking Decision Making uses dynamic optimization programming models to shed light on individual behaviors and their economic implications.