The objective of microeconomic theory is to analyse how individual decision-makers, both consumers and producers, behave in a variety of economic environments. Examples of such environments are bidding in an auction, collectively deciding whether to build a public project, or designing a contract that will induce a worker to exert maximum effort. The common goal in all of these issues is to identify the incentives of the various participating agents and the trade-offs that they face.
Understanding behaviour and microeconomic trade-offs are also crucial for the design of microeconomic policies such as income taxation, healthcare provision and competition policies. It is often the case that a better understanding is obtained by looking at dynamic models, where agents interact repeatedly and learn how to behave optimally over time.
In order to understand how individual decision-makers behave, microeconomists build models, use data and conduct experiments.
Our research expertise ranges from game theory and decision theory to industrial organisation, public economics, corporate finance and behavioural economics.
Members' interests are as follows:
- Hector Calvo's research interests are on international economics and household finance, with emphasis on the economics of risk, uncertainty and expectational coordination. He is currently conducting research on the interaction between information and risk (under which conditions more information reduces risk?) and on expectational coordination in the stock market (does the fear of mis-coordination explain the equity premium?). He is an associate researcher to 'An International Network on Expectational Coordination', based at the College de France, and funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) until 2016.
- Spyros Galanis' research interests are in the fields of decision theory and game theory. The first main topic is unawareness, which examines how agents behave and reason about the information of others when they completely miss certain dimensions of their environment and view a simplified version of the world. The second topic is on providing foundations on how games are played. That is, examining how different assumptions about the behaviour of players can explain which action each player will choose in equilibrium.
- Antonella Ianni is interested in understanding the microfoundations of economic behaviour in markets. At present, she is focusing on learning and evolutionary dynamics applied to games, on the study of networks and network formation, and on the analysis of continuous time processes of opinion formation. She is an executive member of the DTC, Complexity Science at Southampton and she is currently supervising two PhD students.
- Maksymilian Kwiek's research focuses on applied game theory, including games of timing, auctions and games with communication. For example, a recent publication demonstrates that aggressive behaviour is particularly strong in some commonly encountered repeated auctions. This phenomenon may explain a remarkable pattern of prices in European UMTS auctions in early 2000s, in which early auctions generated huge revenues for governments, but in subsequent auctions the prices collapsed. Another research project asks a question about optimal size of required majority in repeated voting, such as in papal conclaves, or in selecting leaders of the EU. This work shows that simple majority may be an inferior method of choosing an outcome. A third example is a project on games with communication which studies product differentiation on mass media markets. Maksymilian coordinates the Micro Theory Reading Group, where important and recent contributions to microeconomic theory are discussed. He is currently supervising one PhD student and he is a student supervisor in the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
- Zacharias Maniadis is a Lecturer at the Department of Economics of the University of Southampton. He is a microeconomist with research interests in experimental economics, applied game theory, and political economy. His recent work concerns the implications of the ‘reproducibility crisis’, observed in several fields of in science, on economic research. Zacharias obtained his PhD in economics in 2008 from the University of California, Los Angeles.
- Jian Tong’s research interest, broadly speaking, is in formal theory of institutions (ie humanly devised constraints), which spans contract theory, organisation theory, industrial organisation and corporate finance. A recent theme of his research is to model how the design of institutions (eg contracts) deals with ambiguity (ie coarsely defined risk profiles), adopting the multiple prior models. This theme is represented in the paper entitled 'A Dynamic Game under Ambiguity: Contracting for Delegated Experimentation' (joint with David Besanko (Northwestern) and Jianjun Wu).
- Mirco Tonin research interests are in labour economics and public finance. His current research projects look at the impact of in-work benefit on educational choices, the effect of information campaigns on water consumption, and the enforcement of import tariffs. Thanks to an ESRC grant titled 'An Investigation into the Sources and Implications of Prosocial Behaviour , he is also working on an experimental project on workers' intrinsic motivation.
- Michael Vlassopoulos is interested in public, behavioural and labour economics. In particular, his current work focuses on the sources and implications of prosocial behaviour, on peer effects with endogenous reference groups, and the effects of bonuses on effort and honesty.