This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for repetitions in the information they receive. We find that, after repeated communication within a social network,...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) develop their networks of foreign affiliates gradually over time. Instead of exploring all profitable opportunities immediately, they first establish themselves in their home countries and then enter new markets stepwise. We argue that this behavior is driven by...

Standard theoretical models of household saving behavior do not typically assume that household perceptions of the world change in response to observed events. In light of the potential importance of such perception changes (e.g., after a financial crisis), this paper considers the hypothesis...

The paper presents a model of housing and credit cycles featuring distorted beliefs and comovement and mutual reinforcement between house price expectations and price developments via credit expansion/contraction. Positive (negative) development in house prices fuels optimism (pessimism) and...

We derive optimal monetary policy in a sticky price model when private agents follow adaptive learning. We show that this slight departure from rationality has important implications for policy design. The central bank faces a new intertemporal trade-off, not present under rational expectations:...

Rational Expectations (RE) models have two crucial dimensions: (i) agents on average correctly forecast future prices given all available information, and (ii) given expectations, agents solve optimization problems and these solutions in turn determine actual price realizations. Experimental...

We consider the problem of an employer who has to choose whether to reemploy agents with a positive track record or agents who were unsuccessful. While previously successful managers are likely to be of high ability, they have also accumulated wealth and will be harder to motivate in the future....

Strategic settings are often complex and agents who lack deep reasoning ability may initially fail to make optimal decisions. This paper experimentally investigates how the decision making quality of an agent's opponent impacts learning-by-doing (LBD) and learning-by-observing (LBO) in a...

This paper presents a new agent-based financial market. It is designed to be both simple enough to gain insights into the nature and structure of what is going on at both the agent and macro levels, but remain rich enough to allow for many interesting evolutionary experiments. The model is...

Several studies show that evolution favors non-selfish preferences only if preference types are observable. We present a new evolutionary scenario applied to the Centipede Game, where we adopt self-confirming equilibrium to capture behavior. We show that altruism may be evolutionarily successful...