Jacob K. Goeree

Professor of Economics

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Research interests

Game theory, experimental economics

Research Statement

In 2004 I joined Caltech where I continue my theoretical and experimental research on auctions. I am currently working on several projects with various faculty and students at Caltech and elsewhere. To effectively execute the different auction experiments I started the development of {Auctions, a suite of open-source Java programs to conduct web-based auction experiments, including complex combinatorial auctions. The idea is to make the software available to the experimental community early 2006. My auction research also has a practical component: I am currently involved in a significant market design problem, i.e. using combinatorial auctions to assign spectrum. The FCC intends to replace their simultaneous ascending auction with a combinatorial format and use experiments to test several alternatives. Charles Holt (Virginia) and I wrote the design for such experiments.

Another research agenda concerns the modeling of bounded rationality in games. Following the econometrics literature on discrete choice models, the Quanta1 Response Equilibrium (QRE) framework introduces "noise" or individual heterogeneity by adding idiosyncratic shocks (errors) to players' payoffs. The novelty in interactive contexts such as games is that players have to take others' heterogeneity into account, and the introduction of small amounts of noise can have large equilibrium effects. The QRE approach is being increasingly applied to the analysis of experimental data. I am currently under contract with Princeton University Press (together with Tom Palfrey, Princeton and Charles Holt, Virginia) to write the first book on QRE.

With Leeat Yariv, a recent hire, I started a research agenda on political science experimentation, including the development of jVote for running large web-based voting experiments. In addition, we initiated Caltech's Mobile Experimental Laboratory (CAMEL) to conduct experiments with non-standard subject pools, including high-school students, homeless, and professionals. Together with a friend of mine who teaches at a local high-school and one of her students, we are currently mapping the network of friendships at her school. The idea is to run several types of experiments at her school and study how choices are affected by positions in the network. Furthermore, by conducting experiments across different age groups we intend to study at what age certain skills or preferences arise, and when "peer effects" are most important.