Laura Manukyan from Yerevan, Armenia, recently joined the ISET-PI team as a research assistant at ISET-PI’s Social Policy Research Center (SPRC).

Laura graduated in the summer of this year from ISET. She wrote her master thesis, titled “Rubinstein Bargaining at the Court”, on a game theoretic model of bargaining under supervision of Professor Florian Biermann. In her master thesis, Laura changes the famous game-theoretic model of bargaining that was proposed by Ariel Rubinstein in the early 1980’s. While in principle, Rubinstein’s sequential bargaining process could go on forever, in Laura’s model the bargaining ends exogenously after a finite number of stages, when – in case of unsuccessful negotiations of the players – a mediator makes a decision on how to resolve the conflict.

Laura’s model describes a situation that can, for example, be found at the court: two parties have a conflict and try to find a private agreement, yet if the bargaining does not lead to a result, the court will finally make a decision. She presented her thesis already with great acclaim at two scientific conferences in Yerevan and at a workshop in Lausanne. In the middle run, she plans to continue her education in a leading Ph.D. program in Europe or the United States.

After her graduation from ISET, Laura completed the CERGE-EI Graduate Teaching Fellows Teaching Principles and Practices for Economics course in Prague, Czech Republic. Equipped with the pedagogical techniques acquired in that course, she will return to Yerevan for one week per month to teach a course named “Data Analysis for Business Decisions” at the American University of Armenia.

Laura’s research and personal interests include behavioral economics, game theory, applied econometrics, and financial mathematics.