Guillaume Frechette

Professor of Economics

My interests revolve around the testing of economic models, mostly having to do with Industrial Organization and Political Economy. This has led me to work on bargaining and infinitely repeated games. I was trained under John H. Kagel at Ohio State University and then Alvin E. Roth at Harvard University. The bulk of my work uses data from laboratory experiment, although some of my work uses field data.My work on bargaining started with “Bargaining in Legislatures: An Experimental Investigation of Open versus Closed Amendment Rules” co-authored with John H. Kagel and Steven F. Lehrer which came out in the American Political Science Review. This paper reports results from an experiment testing the comparative static predictions between two amendment rules of a central model in the theory of legislative bargaining du to Baron and Ferejohn (1989). This was followed by many experiments testing other predictions of the model as well as related models and led to publications in Econometrica as well as other field journals.I have completed two projects on infinitely repeated games. The first one (with Masaki Aoyagi) explored in the laboratory whether subjects could understand how to use a noisy public signal to sustain cooperative outcomes. In the second one, with Pedro Dal Bó, we use the laboratory to study the factors that may affect coordination in an infinitely repeated game.Beside these two main lines of research, I have also studied bargaining over networks, establish empirical evidence of costly unraveling in a market, studied the parity law in France, as well as other topics. Recently I have been working on issues relating to experimental methods as well as the role of language in conveying numerical concepts and advice.