DR. RAJIV SARIN

Professor

PhD in Economics from University of California, USA

Professor, TSLAS, Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, Bhadson Road, Patiala-147004, Punjab

rajiv.sarin@thapar.edu

Rajiv Sarin received his PhD in economics in 1994 from the University of California, San Diego.  He joined Texas A&M University as an assistant professor in 1994.  In 2000 he was promoted to an associate professor with tenure.  He was promoted to full professor in 2006 and held the Elton Lewis faculty fellow of Liberal Arts from 2006 to 2010.  In 2010 he became the Alfred F. Chalk Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. He moved to the University of Birmingham in 2011 and in 2013 he moved to the University of Exeter.  In 2021 he moved to Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Most of Rajiv’s theoretical work has been at the intersection of economics and psychology, an area that has come to be called behavioural economics.  He has contributed to models of behavioural decision theory and behavioural game theory.  His work focuses on individuals who do not have much information about the environment.  He has modelled such individuals as having simplified beliefs, if any, about their environment.  He has paid particular attention to how such people learn and what behaviour they converge to in the long run steady state.  Amongst the learning models he has studied and extended are reinforcement learning models.  His work shows the close relation between these models and those studied in evolutionary game theory and models of risk aversion in expected utility theory.

Rajiv has a keen interest in economic experiments.  He began with seeing how some of the models he had developed explained experimental data gathered by others.  He has, since, been running experiments on auctions, contests, decision making and reputation.

He has published his research in many journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Economic Journal, Games and Economic Behaviour, International Economic Review and Journal of Economic Theory.  Some of his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Over 10 students have completed their PhD under his supervision.  Some of them hold positions in top international research universities while some have positions in central banks.

Rajiv has taught various PhD level courses in the US and UK and taught Master’s level in the UK and at the undergraduate level in India, US and UK

PUBLICATIONS

• “Learning and Risk Aversion,” with Carlos Oyarzun, Journal of Economic Theory, forthcoming.
• “Learning Mean–Variance Preferences,” with Carlos Oyarzun, Games and Economic Behavior, forthcoming.
• “Is Reputation Good or Bad: An Experiment,” with Brit Grosskopf, American Economic Review, 100, (December 2010): 2187–2204.
• “Generalized Contest Success Functions,” with Birendra Rai, Economic Theory, 40 (2009), 139–149.
• “Players with Limited Memory,” with Steffen Huck, Contributions to Theoretical Economics, 4 (2004), article 6. 1
• “Strategy Similarity and Coordination,” with Farshid Vahid, Economic Journal, 114 (2004), 506–527.
• “Expedient and Monotone Learning Rules,” with Tilman B¨orgers and Antonio Morales, Econometrica, 72 (2004), 383–405.
• “Predicting How People Play Games: A Simple Dynamic Model of Choice,” with Farshid Vahid, Games and Economic Behavior, 34 (2001), 104–122.
• “Naive Reinforcement Learning with Endogenous Aspirations,” with Tilman B¨orgers, International Economic Review, 41 (2000), 921–950.
• “Continuous Approximations of Stochastic Evolutionary Game Dynamics,” with Valentina Corradi, Journal of Economic Theory, 94 (2000), 163–191. Corrigendum: http://www.nyu.edu/jet/suppl/2596.erratum.pdf
• “Decision Rules with Bounded Memory,” Journal of Economic Theory, 90 (2000), 151–160.
• “Simple Play in the Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 40 (1999), 105–113.
• “Payoff Assessments without Probabilities: A Simple Dynamic Model of Choice,” with Farshid Vahid, Games and Economic Behavior, 28 (1999), 294–309.
• “Learning Through Reinforcement and Replicator Dynamics,” with Tilman B¨orgers, Journal of Economic Theory, 77 (1997), 1–14.