Matthew J. Ryan

Contact Details

Department of Economics

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland

New Zealand

Phone +64-(0)9-923 5254

Email: m.ryan@auckland.ac.nz

Education

BA (Economics and Philosophy), University of Auckland, 1990.

BCA (Hons) in Economics, VUW, 1991.

PhD (Economics), Yale, 1998.

Research Interests

Microeconomic theory, especially decision theory and auctions.

Published Papers

“Optimism and Firm Formation” (with Luca Rigotti and Rhema Vaithianathan) Economic Theory (Published online 25 September 2009)

“Coasian Dynamics in Repeated English Auctions” (with Flávio Menezes) International Journal of Game Theory 38 (2009): 349-366.

“Orders on Subsets Rationalised by Abstract Convex Geometries” (with Walter Bossert and Arkadii Slinko) Order 26(3) (2009): 237-244.

“Generalizations of SEU: A Geometric Tour of Some Non-Standard Models” Oxford Economic Papers 61 (2009): 327-354.

“Risk Aversion in RDEU” Journal of Mathematical Economics 42(6) (2006): 675-697.

“Auctions with Options to Re-Auction” (with Simon Grant, Atsushi Kajii and Flávio Menezes) International Journal of Economic Theory 2 (2006): 17-39.

"Reserve Price Commitments in Auctions" (with F. Menezes) Economics Letters 87(1) (2005): 35-39.

"Adverse Selection and Insurance Contracting: A Rank-Dependent Utility Analysis" (with Rhema Vaithianathan), Contributions to Theoretical Economics Volume 3: No. 1, Article 4 (2003).

 “Medical Insurance with Rank-Dependent Utility” (with Rhema Vaithianathan) Economic Theory 22 (2003): 689-698.

 “Mathematicians as Great Economists: John Forbes Nash, Jr.” Agenda 9 (2002): 121-134.

 “What Do Uncertainty-Averse Decision-Makers Believe?”  Economic Theory 20 (2002): 47-65.

 “Violations of Belief Persistence in Dempster-Shafer Equilibrium” Games and Economic Behavior 39 (2002): 167-174.

 “Capacity Updating Rules and Rational Belief Change” Theory and Decision 51 (2001): 73- 87.

Book Reviews 

Review of “The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model” by Jean-Jacques Laffont and 

David Martimort, Economic Record 79 (2003): 154-156.

Working Papers

Decision Theory

“Stochastic Choice and Expected Utility”

Entrepreneurship

 “Tolerance of Ambiguity and Entrepreneurial Innovation” (with Luca Rigotti and Rhema Vaithianathan).

Previous versions appeared as UC Berkeley Economics Department WP E01-296 and CentER DP 2001-21 under the title “Entrepreneurial Innovation”.

“Ambiguity and the Diffusion of Innovations” (with Luca Rigotti and Rhema Vaithianathan). [REVISION IN PROGRESS]

Auctions

Miscellaneous

“Self-Interest Seeking Without Guile: The Economic Costs of Honesty” (with R. Vaithianathan)

“Truth-In-Advertising Laws and Pharmaceutical Promotion” (with Rhema Vaithianathan).

Work in Progress

“Lower Probabilities of Centrally Symmetric Sets” (with Alan Rogers)

“Abstract Convexity for Discrete Sets”. (Some slides on this topic here.)

This page was last updated on 06/30/08.