Thomas R. Palfrey, III
Flintridge Foundation Professor of Economics and Political Science, Emeritus
Profile
Thomas R. Palfrey's research spans a range of topics in game theory and its applications to economics, political science, and political economy. His focus is on understanding how people devise strategies when they have incomplete information, combining theoretical, experimental, and empirical analysis. He has applied his research to study elections, committee decision making, auctions, bargaining, public finance, and mechanism design.
In one of his more noteworthy contributions, he and Richard McKelvey used observations from experiments to develop a general theory of strategic behavior that incorporates human error, called quantal response equilibrium, which has been applied to study a broad range of political, economic, and social behavior.
Palfrey founded the Social Science Experimental Laboratory (SSEL) at Caltech in 1998 and served as the director three times (1998–2000, 2002–2004, 2009–2014). Research in SSEL focuses on experimental economics, game theory, finance, decision making, and political science. Palfrey subsequently co-founded the California Social Science Experimental Laboratory (CASSEL) at UCLA with David K. Levine, where he served as co-director from 2000–2004 and
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- William H. Riker Prize in Political Science (2021)
- Fellow, Game Theory Society (2017)
- Economic Theory Fellow, Society for the Advancement in Economic Theory (2011)
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008)
- Fellow, Econometric Society (1995)
- Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in residence (1986-87)
- Carnegie Mellon University Undergraduate Teaching Award in Economics (1985)
- National Bureau of Economic Research (since 2013)
- Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (since 2019)
Selected Publications
Quantal Response Equilibrium: A Statistical Theory of Games (with J. Goeree and C. Holt). Princeton University Press 2016.
Voting: What is, What Could Be (Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project Group Report), 2001.
Bayesian Implementation (with S. Srivastava), Harwood Academic Publisher 1993.
Experimental Foundations of Political Science (with Donald Kinder), University of Michigan Press 1993.
Laboratory Research in Political Economy, University of Michigan Press 1991.
Click here for a list of Professor Palfrey's other publications.