Christopher P. Chambers

Associate Professor of Economics

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Research interests

Microeconomic Theory, Mechanism Design, Political Economy.

Research Statement

My current research focuses primarily on two broadly-defined strands. One strand focuses on the theory of group decision making, and the other focuses specifically on the theory of individual decision making.

In the theory of group decision making, my recent interest has focused on the theory of representative democracy. I have been trying to understand the phenomenon of gerrymandering from a mathematical perspective. Gerrymandering is the practice in representative democracy of strategically constructing voting districts in order to influence the outcome of a vote.

My research has focused on whether or not susceptibility to gerrymandering is a tenet of majority rule, or whether its possibility is more pervasive. Most of my findings suggest that it is fundamentally a problem with the single-member (or winner-take-all) system as opposed to a problem with majority rule. I have recently been working on methods of rectifying the problems with gerrymandering. A theoretical result I have recently established tells us that, in a sense, systems of proportional representation are the only methods of eliminating gerrymandering practices while retaining the fundamental principles of representative democracy.

In my work on individual decision making, one of my main interests is on the idea of non-probabilistic representations of beliefs about uncertainty. One recent result I have obtained is a fundamental impossibility of eliciting beliefs of this type in a simple manner (compare to the theoretical results on probabilistic beliefs). Another result I have recently obtained (with Takashi Hayashi) gives a mathematical counterpart to one of the fundamental experiments rejecting the idea of probabilistic beliefs--the Ellsberg paradox.