Despite much criticism, economic analyses often use Bayesian belief formation. Yet, widely applicable, empirically founded, non-Bayesian approaches are scarce. I investigate whether Thompson Sampling is a suitable unifying model of belief formation by testing its predictions in a pre-registered...

We study an axiomatic variant of quantal response equilibrium (QRE) for normal form games that augments the regularity axioms (Goeree et al., 2005) with various forms of “symmetry” across players and actions. The model refines regular QRE, generalizes logit QRE, and is tractable in many...

The great recession (2008) triggered an apparent discrepancy between empirical findings and macroeconomic models based on rational expectations alone. This gap led to a series of recent developments of a behavioral microfoundation of macroeconomics combined with the underlying experimental and...

The great recession (2008) triggered an apparent discrepancy between empirical findings and macroeconomic models based on rational expectations alone. This gap led to a series of recent developments of a behavioral microfoundation of macroeconomics combined with the underlying experimental and...

This paper proposes Thompson Sampling as a unifying and tractable theory of expectation formation, which is in line with theories of the brain. Thompson Sampling means that in uncertain environments, agents update their beliefs in a Bayesian way, and subsequently make a random draw from the...

Newsvendors, such as newspaper companies, face the challenge that they need to decide how many units to produce before facing the demand by customers, and that their products are perishable. Experimental studies have documented that individuals do not find the optimal solution to that problem...

Economists tend to assume that agents maximize their expected utility. However, many different experiments have questioned expected utility maximization by showing that human behavior can be characterized as random. This paper proposes Thompson Sampling as a theory of human behavior across very...

The goal of this paper is to show how adding behavioral components to micro-foundated models of macroeconomics may contribute to a better understanding of real world phenomena. The authors introduce the reader to variations of the Keynesian Beauty Contest (Keynes, The General Theory of...

Economists tend to assume that agents maximize their expected utility. However, many different experiments have questioned expected utility maximization by showing that human behavior can be characterized as random. This paper proposes Thompson Sampling as a theory of human behavior across very...

This paper introduces a new laboratory experiment based on the New-Keynesian macroeconomy in Woodford (2013). The purpose of the experiment is to study how monetary policy can influence individual expectations to achieve the stabilization of macroeconomic outcomes and to improve social welfare....