羅珮瑜 Melody Lo

挖掘經濟學常被忽視機制 發現產品多種類解決選擇困難症

My research focuses on information and institution, though in many different topics. I enjoy uncovering overlooked mechanism for various phenomena.

One paper takes seriously the observation that people cannot perfectly tell apart small differences and revisits classic topics in market organization. We provide a rationale for the plethora of product varieties in the market:

they help consumers overcome their inability to tell which is best by making many pairwise comparisons. Competition may not help consumers as it would if consumers can tell apart any tiny difference, because some sellers would provide high-quality products, taking all the consumers who are sharp, whereas some provide subpar products, just hoping to be lucky and meet consumers who cannot tell.

Several papers try to formally model a common language and capture the common sense observation that speaking a common language improves communication outcome substantially when the conversing parties’ interests are sufficiently aligned.

Yet another formally capture the essence of open source licenses, and provide a rationale for the dominance of GPL-type and BSD-type licenses despite the infinite possibilities of open source licenses. It also provides examples of environments where some new license designs we provide are superior to both GPL-type and BSD-type licenses.

得獎感言

非常謝謝吳大猷先生紀念獎的肯定。我很謝謝Kim-Sau Chung and Jimmy Chan 兩位教授。我的研究生涯可說是他們救起來的。我原來非常受命定觀的困擾，很擔心在seminar上問的問題很笨，或一篇不好的paper表示我沒有能力做研究，很多精力都花在焦慮上。

在浸會大學期間，看到Kim-Sau Chung教授在seminar上問超多問題，什麼都問，有的連我都可以回答，我開始漸漸放下我的焦慮。也許是置之死地而後生吧！我不再在乎我是否有這個天分做研究，我就是喜歡問問題找答案，只要有地方願意讓我做研究就好了。

感謝臺大給我這個機會，感謝黃貞穎老師一直對我的信任和鼓勵，還有她的大力幫忙建造系上做個體理論的社群。有人一起聊，做研究更有趣。