Friday, March 26, 2010

Hard choices

I was afflicted by an embarrassment of riches yesterday, having to choose between attending the 6-hour guest lectures by Kay Giesecke in one of the graduate course at Fields or attend the AIMS/Phimac talk by Santiago Moreno-Bromberg at McMaster.

In the end I apply a least effort criterion and stayed at McMaster, especially because this was a heavy week, with Thursday sandwiched between a 3-day workshop and a 2-day forum.

Santiago's talk was nothing less than fascinating, touching on many important topics (optimal design of contracts, risk sharing, principal-agent problems with multiple agents AND multiple principals, etc). It is a perfect example of a recent but unmistakable trend of mathematical finance research expanding from strict financial markets and moving in the direction of mainstream economics.

ps: I'm sure that Kay's course was also lovely (and the credit risk students at Fields are a very lucky bunch for having him here), just can't comment because I wasn't there. Maybe this is a good point for some of my secret readers to post a comment :)

No comments:

Post a Comment