Applied Ergodicity

The concept of applied ergodicity addresses how averages across time and across a population relate in practical settings. Many systems in economics, finance, and even personal decision-making are often assumed to be ergodic — meaning that an individual's time-averaged outcomes are representative of the average outcomes across a whole population. However, this assumption usually doesn't hold in real-world scenarios. In this project, we focus on identifying when and why this discrepancy occurs, leveraging concepts from ergodic theory to understand the implications of non-ergodicity. Our goal is to help design economic models and reinforcement learning methods, more in tune with the individuals and their experiences, by focusing on time averages rather than ensemble averages.