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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