Last week Sandeep and I were at the Cowles Summer Microeconomic Theory Conference at Yale, a fantastic conference with many great papers and an All-Star roster of pure attendees.  Tomasz Strzalecki presented a provocative new paper on limited attention and asset price volatility (joint with Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer), Olivier Gossner showed us how Fudenberg and Levine’s famous reputation papers should have been written, and Lones Smith presented his paper with Elena Quercioli on The Economics of Counterfeit Money.  When pressed with a technical question from the audience he deployed a line that I will certainly be using myself in the future under similar circumstances:

It sounds like you are talking about some subtle math, but I’m just trying to pretend I’m in the 5th grade.

We liked his paper so much we thought about blogging it but then decided to do it one better and ask Lones himself to write about it in a guest post. And he agreed.

Of course, while he is at it we might as well hear what else he has on his mind so we’re going to have him sit in here at Cheap Talk for the week.  And if you know Lones, then you know that anything can happen, so it’s going to be fun.

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