It is often said that everyone understands precisely what is meant by the notion of probability-except those who have spent their lives studying the matter. Upon close scrutiny, the intuitively obvious idea of probability becomes quite elusive. Is it a subjective or objective concept? Are random variables simply improperly measured deterministic variables, or inherently random? What is meant by the phrase "other things held constant" that often appears in descriptions of probability? These questions involve fundamental philosophical and scientific issues, and promise to elude definitive answers for some time. The same type of difficulty arises when attempting to produce a volume on microeconomic theory. The obvious first question-what is microeconomic theory?--

This is the first of two volumes containing papers and commentaries presented at the Eleventh World Congress of the Econometric Society, held in Montreal, Canada in August 2015. These papers provide state-of-the-art guides to the most important recent research in economics. The book includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussion of future directions for a wide variety of topics, covering both theory and application. These volumes provide a unique, accessible survey of progress on the discipline, written by leading specialists in their fields. The first volume includes theoretical and applied papers addressing topics such as dynamic mechanism design, agency problems, and networks.

It is often said that everyone understands precisely what is meant by the notion of probability-except those who have spent their lives studying the matter. Upon close scrutiny, the intuitively obvious idea of probability becomes quite elusive. Is it a subjective or objective concept? Are random variables simply improperly measured deterministic variables, or inherently random? What is meant by the phrase "other things held constant" that often appears in descriptions of probability? These questions involve fundamental philosophical and scientific issues, and promise to elude definitive answers for some time. The same type of difficulty arises when attempting to produce a volume on microeconomic theory. The obvious first question-what is microeconomic theory?--

This is the second of two volumes containing papers and commentaries presented at the Eleventh World Congress of the Econometric Society, held in Montreal, Canada in August 2015. These papers provide state-of-the-art guides to the most important recent research in economics. The book includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussion of future directions for a wide variety of topics, covering both theory and application. These volumes provide a unique, accessible survey of progress on the discipline, written by leading specialists in their fields. The second volume addresses topics such as big data, macroeconomics, financial markets, and partially identified models.

This is the first of two volumes containing papers and commentaries presented at the Eleventh World Congress of the Econometric Society, held in Montreal, Canada in August 2015. These papers provide state-of-the-art guides to the most important recent research in economics. The book includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussion of future directions for a wide variety of topics, covering both theory and application. These volumes provide a unique, accessible survey of progress on the discipline, written by leading specialists in their fields. The first volume includes theoretical and applied papers addressing topics such as dynamic mechanism design, agency problems, and networks.

The book describes formal models of reasoning that are aimed at capturing the way that economic agents, and decision makers in general think about their environment and make predictions based on their past experience. The focus is on analogies (case-based reasoning) and general theories (rule-based reasoning), and on the interaction between them, as well as between them and Bayesian reasoning. A unified approach allows one to study the dynamics of inductive reasoning in terms of the mode of reasoning that is used to generate predictions.

The author examines the interplay between evolutionary game theory and the equilibrium selection problem in noncooperative games. Evolutionary game theory is one of the most active and rapidly growing areas of research in economics. Unlike traditional game theory models, which assume that all players are fully rational and have complete knowledge of details of the game, evolutionary models assume that people choose their strategies through a trial-and-error learning process in which they gradually discover that some strategies work better than others. In games that are repeated many times, low-payoff strategies tend to be weeded out, and an equilibrium may emerge. Larry Samuelson has been one of the main contributors to the evolutionary game theory literature. In Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection, he examines the interplay between evolutionary game theory and the equilibrium selection problem in noncooperative games. After providing an overview of the basic issues of game theory and a presentation of the basic models, the book addresses evolutionary stability, the dynamics of sample paths, the ultimatum game, drift, noise, backward and forward induction, and strict Nash equilibria.

This is the second of two volumes containing papers and commentaries presented at the Eleventh World Congress of the Econometric Society, held in Montreal, Canada in August 2015. These papers provide state-of-the-art guides to the most important recent research in economics. The book includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussion of future directions for a wide variety of topics, covering both theory and application. These volumes provide a unique, accessible survey of progress on the discipline, written by leading specialists in their fields. The second volume addresses topics such as big data, macroeconomics, financial markets, and partially identified models.