Microeconomic Theory at Michigan State University
[Faculty][Selected publications][Research and teaching activities][Other groups at MSU]
The microeconomic theory research conducted at Michigan State is primarily applied theory.
The strength of the microeconomic theory area lies in its diversity and its focus on applications to a broad range of topics:
industrial organization, political economy, information economics, organization economics, and labor economics.
Faculty in other fields also conduct microeconomic theoretical research in behavioral economics,
development, trade, public economics, decision theory, and micro-founded macroeconomics.
The theory group has an external speakers seminar, an internal speakers brown bag, a reading group, an annual joint conference with University of Michigan, and a range of graduate course offerings.
The core theory faculty are
Jay Pil Choi, Jon Eguia, Thomas Jeitschko, Ce Liu, Arijit Mukherjee, and Hanzhe Zhang,
who actively participate in research and teaching activities.
In addition to the core theory group, many other faculty conduct microeconomic theoretical research in other fields,
such as
Benjamin Bushong (in behavioral economics),
Chris Ahlin (in development economics),
Carl Davidson and Steve Matusz (in trade),
Jay Wilson (in public economics),
Antonio Galvao (at the intersection between decision theory and econometrics),
and Luis Araujo and Tony Doblas-Madrid (in micro-founded macroeconomics).
Benjamin Bushong, Failures in forecasting: An experiment on interpersonal projection bias (with Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch),
Management Science, forthcoming.
Jay Pil Choi and Arijit Mukherjee, "Sherlocking" and platform information policy
Management Science, forthcoming.
Ce Liu and Hanzhe Zhang, Self-enforced job matching (with Ziwei Wang),
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming.
Arijit Mukherjee and PhD student Zijian Qi, Optimal job design and information elicitation (with Luis Vasconcelos),
Rand Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
Hanzhe Zhang, Pay it forward: Theory and evidence (with Amanda Chuan),
Games and Economic Behavior, October 2025.
Hanzhe Zhang, Changes in marital sorting: Theory and evidence from the US (with Pierre-André Chiappori, Monica Costa Dias, and Costas Meghir),
Journal of Political Economy, October 2025.
Hanzhe Zhang, Reputational bargaining with external resolution opportunities (with Mehmet Ekmekci),
Review of Economic Studies, May 2025.
Jon Eguia, Lognormal (re)distribution: A macro-founded theory of inequality (with Dimitrios Xefteris),
European Economic Review, November 2024.
Hanzhe Zhang, Decentralized matching with transfers: Experimental and noncooperative analyses (with Simin He, Jiabin Wu, and Xun Zhu),
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2024.
Ce Liu, Credible persuasion (with Xiao Lin),
Journal of Political Economy, July 2024.
Ce Liu, Stability in repeated matching markets,
Theoretical Economics, November 2023.
Arijit Mukherjee, What makes agility fragile? A dynamic theory of organizational rigidity (with Jin Li and Luis Vasconcelos),
Management Science, June 2023.
Hanzhe Zhang, Marital preferences and stable matching in cultural evolution (with Victor Hiller and Jiabin Wu),
Journal of Economic Theory, June 2023.
Benjamin Bushong, Reference dependence and attribution bias: Evidence from real-effort experiments (with Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch),
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023.
Jay Pil Choi, Platform design biases in ad-funded two-sided markets (with Doh-Shin Jeon),
Rand Journal of Economics, April 2023.
Benjamin Bushong, Learning with misattribution of reference dependence (with Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch),
Journal of Economic Theory, July 2022.
Chris Ahlin, Group lending with covariate risk (with Godwin Debrah),
Journal of Development Economics, June 2022.
Jay Pil Choi, Network externalities, dominant value margins, and equilibrium uniqueness (with Christodoulos Stefanadis),
International Economic Review, May 2022.
Antonio Galvao, Do people maximize quantiles? (with Luciano de Castro, Charles Noussair, and Liang Qiao),
Games and Economic Behavior, March 2022.
Jon Eguia, Multilateral regime change,
Journal of Public Economics, January 2022.
Jon Eguia, Implementation by vote-buying mechanisms (with Dimitrios Xefteris),
American Economic Review, September 2021.
Arijit Mukherjee, Learning to game the system (with Jin Li and Luis Vasconcelos),
Review of Economic Studies, July 2021.
Hanzhe Zhang, An investment-and-marriage model with differential fecundity: on the college gender gap,
Journal of Political Economy, May 2021.
Jay Pil Choi, A leverage theory of tying in two-sided markets with non-negative price constraints (with Doh-Shin Jeon),
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021.
Benjamin Bushong, A model of relative thinking (with Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein),
Review of Economic Studies, January 2021.
Jay Pil Choi and Arijit Mukherjee, Optimal certification policy, entry, and investment in the presence of public signals,
Rand Journal of Economics, November 2020.
Thomas Jeitschko and PhD alum Mark Tremblay, Platform competition with endogenous homing,
International Economic Review, August 2020.
Hanzhe Zhang, Pre-matching gambles,
Games and Economic Behavior, May 2020.
Ce Liu, Costly information acquisition (with Christopher P. Chambers and John Rehbeck),
Journal of Economic Theory, March 2020.
Jay Pil Choi, Privacy and personal data collection with information externalities (with Doh-Shin Jeon and Byung-Cheol Kim),
Journal of Public Economics, May 2019.
Jon Eguia, Information and targeted spending,
Theoretical Economics, May 2019.
Jon Eguia, Tactical extremism,
American Political Science Review, February 2019.
Luis Araujo, Optimal monetary interventions in credit markets (with Tai-Wei Hu),
Journal of Economic Theory, November 2018.
Arijit Mukherjee, On the optimality of diverse expert panels in persuasion games (with Sourav Bhattacharya and Maria Goltsman),
Games and Economic Behavior, September 2018.
Jay Wilson, Tax competition with heterogeneous capital mobility (with Steeve Mongrain),
Journal of Public Economics, August 2018.
Jon Eguia, Equilibrium selection in sequential games with imperfect information (with Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Rebecca Morton, and Antonio Nicolò),
Games and Economic Behavior, May 2018.
Jon Eguia, Discrimination and assimilation at school,
Journal of Public Economics, December 2017.
Carl Davidson, Steve Matusz, and Susan Chun Zhu, Global engagement and the occupational structure of firms (with Fredrik Heyman and Fredrik Sjöholm),
European Economic Review, November 2017.
Jon Eguia, Slicing and bundling (with Odilon Câmara),
Journal of Politics, May 2017.
Jay Pil Choi, A theory of patent portfolios (with Heiko Gerlach),
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017.
Chris Ahlin, Matching patterns when group size exceeds two,
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2017.
Arijit Mukherjee, Relational contracts with subjective peer evaluations (with Joyee Deb and Jin Li),
Rand Journal of Economics, Spring 2016.
Tony Doblas-Madrid, A finite model of riding bubbles,
Journal of Mathematical Economics, May 2016.
Research and teaching activities (back to top)
We have
an external speakers seminar,
an internal speakers brown bag,
and a reading group.
We offer
first-year PhD courses (EC812A: Microeconomics I, EC812B: Microeconomics II) and
second-year PhD courses (EC911: Strategic behavior in economic environment,
EC912: Risk, uncertainty, and information economics), and related coursese in behavioral economics and industrial organization.
