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

Behavioral and experimental literature on financial instability focuses on either subjective price expectations (Learning-to-Forecast experiments) or individual trading (Learning-to-Optimize experiments). Bao et al. (2018) have shown that subjects have problems with both tasks. In this paper, I...

The use of coarse categories is prevalent in various situations and has been linked to biased economic outcomes, ranging from discrimination against minorities to empirical anomalies in financial markets. In this paper we study economic rationales for categorizing coarsely. We think of the way...

We compare forecasts from different adaptive learning algorithms and calibrations applied to US real-time data on inflation and growth. We find that the Least Squares with constant gains adjusted to match (past) survey forecasts provides the best overall performance both in terms of forecasting...

Adaptive learning introduces persistence in the evolution of agents' beliefs over time. For applied purposes this is a convenient feature to help explain why economies present sluggish adjustments towards equilibrium. The pace of learning is directly determined by the gain parameter, which...

This experiment compares the price dynamics and bubble formation in an asset market with a price adjustment rule in three treatments where subjects (1) submit a price forecast only, (2) choose quantity to buy/sell and (3) perform both tasks. We find deviation of the market price from the...

Behavioral and experimental literature on financial instability focuses on either subjective price expectations (Learning-to-Forecast experiments) or individual trading (Learning-to-Optimize experiments). Bao et al. (2017) have shown that subjects have problems with both tasks. In this paper, I...

The anterior insula has been implicated in both the experience and the anticipation of negative outcomes. Although individual differences in insular sensitivity have been associated with self-report measures of chronic anxiety, previous research has not examined whether individual differences in...

We explore the consequence of learning to forecast in a very simple environment. Agents have bounded memory and incorrectly believe that there is nonlinear structure underlying the aggregate time series dynamics. Under social learning with finite memory, agents may be unable to learn the true...

Do firms learn to forecast future business conditions after major structural changes to the economy? How long does it take? We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment, where firms in the East are treated with ignorance about the distribution of market states, to test a Bayesian...