Accounting for Additional Heterogeneity: A Theoretic Extension of an Extant Economic Model

<p>The assumption in economics of a representative agent is often made. However, it is a very rigid assumption. Hall and Jones (2004b) presented an economic model that essentially provided for a representative agent for each age group in determining the group's health level function. Our work seeks to extend their theoretical version of the model by allowing for two representative agents for each age—one for each of “Healthy” and “Sick” risk-factor groups—to allow for additional heterogeneity in the populace. The approach to include even more risk-factor groups is also briefly discussed. While our “extended” theoretical model is not applied directly to relevant data, several techniques that could be applicable were the relevant data to be obtained are demonstrated on other data sets. This includes examples of using linear classification, fitting baseline-category logit models, and running the genetic algorithm.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

MS

Grantor dc:publisher

Brigham Young University - Provo

Author dc:creator

• Barney, Bradley John

• representative agent
• linear classification
• baseline-category logit
• genetic algorithm
• Robert Hall and Charles Jones
• Statistics and Probability

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1223

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-2222