KAEA VSS Micro Seminar April 4th 8PM ET

Time: 8 – 9 PM ET, Thursday, April 4th, 2024 (9 – 10 AM KST, April 5th)

Speaker: Younggyun Kim, Florida State University

Zoom link:

Title: Blackwell-Monotone Information Costs (joint with Xiaoyu Cheng)

Abstract: A Blackwell-monotone information cost function assigns higher costs to experiments that are Blackwell more informative. We provide a complete characterization of all such information cost functions under mild functional assumptions, i.e., local Lipschitz continuity with and without quasiconvexity. The key condition is given by a system of linear differential inequalities derived from a novel geometric characterization of Blackwell information order. We use our characterization to identify cost functions with practical functional forms, including linear costs and monotone $phi$-divergence costs. As an application, we analyze a moral hazard problem with Blackwell-monotone costly monitoring.

KAEA-VSS Micro Seminar Organizers: Yujung Hwang, Kyungmin Kim, Dongwoo Kim, Sokbae Lee, and Boyoung Seo