理论经济学：2025–2026 年度综述

An annual survey of the econ.TH arXiv category, covering research published from September 2025 – August 2026. Built on a close-reading set of 120 papers and organised into 44 chapters, it maps the year by the field's research sub-directions.

Book framework (share of the year's output):

• General Equilibrium and Dynamic Decision Theory (20.2%) — This subfield focuses on characterizing optimality, welfare effects, and stability in general equilibrium models and dynamic settings, particularly under model misspecification and correlated evaluations.
• Risk Preferences and Optimal Risk Sharing (11.4%) — Research in this area examines the theoretical foundations of risk aversion, preference consistency, and optimal risk-sharing mechanisms, including network-based systemic risk and insurance frictions.
• Matching Markets and Fair Allocation Mechanisms (10.9%) — This direction investigates stability, envy-freeness, and fairness in matching markets, addressing dynamic matching, combinatorial exchanges, and algorithmic learning in large markets.
• Social Learning and Network Dynamics (10.5%) — This subfield analyzes how agents learn and form beliefs within social networks, focusing on price dynamics, evolutionary stability under misspecification, and the impact of network structures on choice.
• Strategic Interaction in AI-Driven Economies (10.5%) — This emerging area models the strategic behavior, pricing, and welfare implications of interactions between human agents and AI agents, including issues of bias, delegation, and supply chain regulation.
• Game Theory Equilibria and Network Games (9.5%) — This foundational branch studies the existence and properties of Nash equilibria in various game structures, including repeated games, network games, and games with externalities or communication constraints.
• Mechanism Design and Market Efficiency (8.5%) — This field focuses on designing optimal mechanisms and market structures, addressing dynamic valuation, apportionment, and the efficiency comparisons of different market designs.
• Information Aggregation and Acquisition (7.6%) — This subfield explores how private information is acquired, aggregated, and shared in oligopolies and networks, examining the limits of information structures and privacy-preserving mechanisms.
• Screening, Disclosure, and Sequential Choice (5.8%) — This area investigates optimal screening strategies, information disclosure, and the behavioral effects of sequential choice presentation in competitive and platform environments.
• Bayesian Persuasion and Robust Information Design (5.1%) — This advanced topic centers on the axiomatic foundations and robustness of Bayesian persuasion, including causal inference, price discrimination limits, and real-time information verification.

Each sub-direction is covered across three chapters — how it framed its questions, the strength of its key findings, and its open debates and frontiers — so the reader gets a traceable picture of what this part of the field actually produced over the year.