This paper uses proprietary data comprising of 4,155 participants who attended financial education seminars conducted by a major U.S. consumer credit counseling agency in 2007. In this study, knowledge gained from attending the seminars is estimated using a multivariate regression model. Results...

I examine the learning process that economic agents use to update their expectation of an uncertain and infrequently observed event. I use a new nation-wide panel dataset of large regional floods and flood insurance policies to show that insurance take-up spikes the year after a flood and then...

I propose a flexible non-parametric method using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to estimate a generalized model of expectation formation. This approach does not rely on restrictive assumptions of functional forms and parametric methods yet nests the standard approaches of empirical studies on...

This paper experimentally investigates the nature of impulses in impulse learning. Particularly, we analyze whether positive feedback (i.e., yielding a superior payo in a game) or negative feedback (i.e., yielding an inferior payo in a game) leads to a systematic change in the individual...

This paper contrasts the concept of a complex, adaptive agent with the idea of a programmed agent, and develops a new vision of agent learning and structure. The concept of the agent is analyzed through a consideration of internal models, practice, the concept of routine and its influence on 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. (2018) have shown that subjects have problems with both tasks. In this paper, I...

Analyses of human reaction to economic incentives reveal contradictory deviations from maximization. For example, underinvestment in the stock market suggests risk aversion, but insufficient diversification of financial assets suggests risk-seeking. The leading explanations for these...

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...

We provide evidence of a powerful barrier to social learning: people are much less sensitive to information others discover compared to equally-relevant information they discover themselves. In a series of incentivized lab experiments, we ask participants to guess the color composition of balls...