Abigail Brown

I'm a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney in their School of Finance and Economics. My degree is in policy analysis from the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica. My research interests include the effect of financial reporting fraud on economic learning, technological development and consumer welfare. I can't wait to come to Santa Fe--a dream come true.

Main interests: Other than an instinctive fascination with anything and everything that falls under the label “complex systems,” my main interests in this context are how information and, most interestingly, misinformation gets spread and used throughout a group.

Expertise: I’m expecting to be on the weaker end of the technical ability spectrum, but I suppose I will be bringing fairly extensive expertise in game theory.

Goals: I’d like to get a fair distance up the learning curve on the technical skills needed to be a serious researcher in the area. I’m also interested in learning more about how to think about transferring insights from agent-based models and the like to some sort of statement about how real social systems actually work.

Project ideas: I’d love to continue to work in my current area of how financial statement fraud (and other forms of profit misrepresentation, intentional or otherwise) affects the real economy, competition, and technological innovation and uptake. Perhaps explore parallels to fitness misrepresentation in biology (assuming parallels exist!).