This paper investigates the effects of media coverage and macroeconomic conditions on inflation forecast disagreement of German households and professional forecasters. We adopt a Bayesian learning model in which media coverage of inflation affects forecast disagreement by influencing...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, 2008.

Unchecked anthropogenic climate change has the potential to destroy human lives and wealth on an unprecedented scale. This dissertation analyzes from an economic perspective various public policy options to correct the market failures caused by climate change.The widespread adoption of...

We embed a news shock, a noisy indicator of the future state, in a two-state Markovswitching growth model. Our framework, combined with parameter learning, features rich history-dependent uncertainty dynamics. We show that bad news that arrives during a prolonged economic boom can trigger a...

Based on a cognitive notion of neo-additive capacities reflecting likelihood insensitivity with respect to survival chances, we construct a Choquet Bayesian learning model over the life-cycle that generates a motivational notion of neo-additive survival beliefs expressing ambiguity attitudes. We...

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 paper proves that the Bayesian approach to learning and expectations formation implies no propositions that could conceivably be refuted by observation. For a (non-expanding) universe infinite in time but finite at any point of time, it is shown that by a suitable choice of priors, any...

We analyze how markets adjust to new information when the reliability of news is uncertain and has to be estimated itself. We propose a Bayesian learning model where market participants receive fundamental information along with noisy estimates of news' precision. It is shown that the efficiency...

This paper studies a game of strategic experimentation in which the players have access to two-armed bandits where the risky arm distributes lumpsum payoffs according to a Poisson process with unknown intensity. Because of free-riding, there is an inefficiently low level of experimentation in...

The dynamics of self-confidence are modelled in an environment where rational individuals optimally choose educations and occupations with the aim to acquire productive skills while learning about ability. It is shown how the presence of uninformative options can trap individuals below their...