The claim that this couldn’t work because such models are limited seems just arbitrary and wrong to me.
The economists I spoke to seemed to think that in agency unawareness models conclusions follow pretty immediately from the assumptions and so don’t teach you much. It’s not that they can’t model real agency problems, just that you don’t learn much from the model. Perhaps if we’d spoken to more economists there would have been more disagreement on this point.
We have lots of models that are useful even when the conclusions follow pretty directly. Such as supply and demand. The question is whether such models are useful, not if they are simple.
The economists I spoke to seemed to think that in agency unawareness models conclusions follow pretty immediately from the assumptions and so don’t teach you much. It’s not that they can’t model real agency problems, just that you don’t learn much from the model. Perhaps if we’d spoken to more economists there would have been more disagreement on this point.
We have lots of models that are useful even when the conclusions follow pretty directly. Such as supply and demand. The question is whether such models are useful, not if they are simple.