Spotlight on our Faculty
RISE Lecture – Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith
Spotlight on our Faculty
Isabelle Perrigne, Professor of Economics
Research Interests: Empirical Industrial Organization, Applied Microeconometrics
Isabelle Perrigne is a Professor of Economics whose area of expertise is empirical industrial organization, often combining models of incomplete information, data analysis and microeconometrics. Her current interests are in nonlinear pricing and insurance, and she has made recent contributions to the development of the structural analysis of auction data. Professor Perrigne previously held appointments at the University of Southern California and Pennsylvania State University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and she has served as an NSF panelist. Professor Perrigne has published in the leading economic journals including Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, and most recently the Journal of Political Economy.
How did you become interested in economics?
That’ s an interesting question. Very few people say that they were inspired as a kid or a teenager to be an economist. At younger ages, you have more aspirations about saving the world. As a matter of fact, I didn’ t want to do economics at all. When I was a high school student I wanted to go to medical school, but I had some health issues that made it difficult to practice the way I intended. Afterwards, I was thinking about what I could do and I was looking for something mathematical or quantitative. I did my undergraduate studies in France and unfortunately most fields had no formal modeling. I was looking for something more rigorous and economics was best suited to what I had in mind.
RISE Lecture – Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith
What are your current research interests / projects?
I’ m an empirical IO( Industrial Organization) person. I just got a paper published in the Journal of Political Economy on nonlinear pricing in telecommunications, and I continue to work in that area. I work on insurance, which is also based on models of incomplete information, and I just started a new project on the auctioning of contracts. I like to do something intellectually challenging, so in all my papers I try to propose new approaches and develop new tools that other researchers can use. For instance, I’ m currently working on choice sets in differentiated product models. Although there’ s a huge literature on that topic, everyone assumes that the consumer choice set is exogenous, and in fact it’ s endogenous. So, in conjunction with some co-authors, I’ m trying to develop an estimator for endogenous choice sets for
The Rice Initiative for the Study of Economics( RISE), directed by current Dean of Social Sciences and former Economics Department Chair Antonio Merlo, was recently established to enhance research and teaching in economics at Rice. As part of its activities, RISE hosts a lecture series that has brought several recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Rice, including Professors Roger Myerson, Thomas Sargent, Alvin Roth, and Michael Spence. This fall the RISE lecture series will feature Professor Vernon L. Smith of Chapman University, who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for his pathbreaking work in experimental economics. He will deliver a lecture entitled“ On Learning from Proving Yourself Wrong: Two Cases from Experimental Economics, with Implications and Insights for the Economy.” We encourage you to attend the lecture, which will be held at 5:00 p. m. on November 9 in the Glasscock School Auditorium; for more details, see the economics department website. a differentiated product. I have perhaps eight or nine projects going on these days, but the common features are IO, models of incomplete information, and a lot of econometrics.
What other current research in IO are you most excited about?
There are plenty of things going on these days, including work about online markets and research made possible by the availability of big data. Many activities in the private sector will change academic research – indeed, many famous IO economists work for Amazon – and we have a lot of interaction in IO with the private sector due to the availability of data. With the web and new technologies there are so many new problems and new data sets to analyze. For example, we have done a lot of research in insurance, but soon if you don’ t need a driver maybe you won’ t need insurance. Some markets may disappear in the future while others may emerge. IO will certainly capture this trend, probably to a greater extent than other fields, but it’ s hard to predict where things are going. IO also has a lot to bring to other fields in economics, because we’ re quite advanced in terms of how we combine models with data and with econometrics. Empirical IO has developed a lot of expertise that could benefit a lot of other areas of economics, such as development, where there are plenty of problems, such as energy pricing, that are very related to IO. You now see this kind of interaction between IO and labor, education, political economics, development, and macro, and I think there will be more interesting and highly productive connections in the future.
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