Do elementary statistics or equilibrium theory deliver any rules of thumb regarding how we should argue in debates? We suggest a framework for normative analysis of debates. In our framework, each discussant wants the audience to believe that the actual state coincides with the discussant's...

This paper demonstrates that a misspecified model of information processing interferes with long-run learning and allows inefficient choices to persist in the face of contradictory public information. I consider an observational learning environment where agents observe a private signal about a...

This paper investigates the learnability of an equilibrium where agents formulate their forecasts under adaptive learning with heterogeneously misspecified econometric models; the equilibrium is called a Heterogeneous Misspecification Equilibrium (HME). The paper finds that the learnability...

This chapter presents an overview of the existing learning models in the economic literature. Furthermore, it discusses the choice of models that should be used under various circumstances and how adequate learning models can be chosen in simulation approaches. It gives advice for using the many...

State-space models have been increasingly used to study macroeconomic and financial problems. A state-space representation consists of two equations, a measurement equation which links the observed variables to unobserved state variables and a transition equation describing the dynamics of the...

In this paper we examine how model uncertainty due to the preference for robustness (RB) affects optimal taxation and the evolution of debt in the Barro tax-smoothing model (1979). We first study how the government spending shocks are absorbed in the short run by varying taxes or through debt...

This paper develops a general framework to study how misinterpreting information impacts learning. Our main result is a simple criterion to characterize long-run beliefs based on the underlying form of misspecification. We present this characterization in the context of social learning, then...

The behavioural finance literature attributes the persistent market misvaluation observed in real data to the presence of deviations from rational thinking of the actors involved. Cognitive biases and the use of simple heuristics can be described using expected utility maximising agents that...

We model inter-temporal ambiguity as the scenario in which a Bayesian learner holds more than one prior distribution over a set of parameters and provide necessary and sufficient condition for ambiguity to fade away because of learning. Our condition applies to most learning environments: iid...

This paper develops a general framework to study how misinterpreting information impacts learning. We consider sequential social learning and passive individual learning settings in which individuals observe signals and the actions of predecessors. Individuals have incorrect, or misspecified...