arXiv subjects

Olivier Gossner

Publications and source records attributed to Olivier Gossner.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Comparative Statics of Information Acquisition and Risk Aversion

This paper studies how willingness to pay for information depends on risk aversion. We model a decision maker who faces background risk and can acquire information before choosing from a menu of assets. We show that the comparative statics depend on two factors. The first is whether available assets constitute an investment menu, whose payoffs are procyclical with background wealth, or an insurance menu, whose payoffs are countercyclical. The second factor is the tail geometry of background risk. We show that willingness to pay for information decreases with risk aversion for investment menus when the density of background risk is log-concave, and that it increases with risk aversion for insurance menus when background risk is downward-log-convex. The proofs compare the distributions of terminal wealth with and without information. They develop new aggregation arguments for state-dependent single-crossing comparisons. We also construct reversals under strictly log-convex tails for investment menus and super-exponential left tails for insurance menus.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Strategic Type Spaces

We provide a strategic foundation for information: in any given game with incomplete information we define strategic quotients as information representations that are sufficient for players to compute best-responses to other players. We prove 1/ existence and essential uniqueness of a minimal strategic quotient called the Strategic Type Space (STS) in which a type is given by an interim correlated rationalizability hierarchy and represents a set of beliefs over other players' types and nature that rationalize this hierarchy and 2/ that the minimal STS has a recursive structure that is captured by a finite automaton.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Direct Representations for Interim Correlated Rationalizability

We study direct representations of information for interim correlated rationalizability. For a fixed finite payoff structure, each type induces a hierarchy of surviving action sets. Pushing the common prior through this map projects the information structure onto the solution concept's output language. When best-response regions are convex, this representation is direct: the solution concept applied to the hierarchy seen as a type is the identity. The induced distributions are characterized by level-by-level obedience constraints. Terminal ICR sets alone do not have this property. For arbitrary finite payoff structures, we refine each hierarchy level with a tag identifying a convex cell of its best-response region. Augmented hierarchies provide a direct representation and project onto the ordinary hierarchy. Full augmented hierarchies may form a continuum, but retaining only the tags at the boundaries of constant stretches of the ordinary hierarchy yields an exact countable representation with finitely many obedience constraints per type. Finite-type models are dense in terminal rationalizability outcome distributions.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2020

High-sensitivity COVID-19 group testing by digital PCR

Background: Worldwide demand for SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR testing is increasing as more countries are impacted by COVID-19 and as testing remains central to contain the spread of the disease, both in countries where the disease is emerging and in countries that are past the first wave but exposed to re-emergence. Group testing has been proposed as a solution to expand testing capabilities but sensitivity concerns have limited its impact on the management of the pandemic. Digital PCR (RT-dPCR) has been shown to be more sensitive than RT-PCR and could help in this context. Methods: We implemented RT-dPCR based COVID-19 group testing on commercially available system and assay (Naica System from Stilla Technologies) and investigated the sensitivity of the method in real life conditions of a university hospital in Paris, France, in May 2020. We tested the protocol in a direct comparison with reference RT-PCR testing on 448 samples split into groups of 3 sizes for RT-dPCR analysis: 56 groups of 8 samples, 28 groups of 16 samples and 14 groups of 32 samples. Results: Individual RT-PCR testing identified 25 positive samples. Using groups of 8, testing by RT-dPCR identified 23 groups as positive, corresponding to 26 true positive samples including 2 samples not initially detected by individual RT-PCR but confirmed positive by further RT-PCR and RT-dPCR investigation. For groups of 16, 15 groups tested positive, corresponding to 25 true positive samples identified. 100% concordance is found for groups of 32 but with limited data points.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2019

Payoffs-Beliefs Duality and the Value of Information

In decision problems under incomplete information, actions (identified to payoff vectors indexed by states of nature) and beliefs are naturally paired by bilinear duality. We exploit this duality to analyze the value of information, using concepts and tools from convex analysis. We define the value function as the support function of the set of available actions: the subdifferential at a belief is the set of optimal actions at this belief; the set of beliefs at which an action is optimal is the normal cone of the set of available actions at this point. Our main results are 1) a necessary and sufficient condition for positive value of information 2) global estimates of the value of information of any information structure from local properties of the value function and of the set of optimal actions taken at the prior belief only. We apply our results to the marginal value of information at the null, that is, when the agent is close to receiving no information at all, and we provide conditions under which the marginal value of information is infinite, null, or positive and finite.

math.OC↗