Since central banks have limited information concerning the transmission channel of monetary policy, they are faced with the difficult task of simultaneously controlling the policy target and estimating the impact of policy actions. A tradeoff between estimation and control arises because policy...

A new methodology is presented to solve an important model of dynamic decision-making with a continuous unknown parameter (or state). The methodology centers on the concepts of “continuation-value function” (which gives the expected value-to-go as a function of the parameter under a feasible...

This paper develops a theoretical model for the formation of subjective beliefs on individual survival expectations. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) indicate that, on average, young respondents underestimate their true survival probability whereas old respondents overestimate...

Since central banks have limited information concerning the transmission channel of monetary policy, they are faced with the difficult task of simultaneously controlling the policy target and estimating the impact of policy actions. A tradeoff between estimation and control arises because policy...

We study the experimentation dynamics of a decision maker (DM) in a two-armed bandit setup (Bolton and Harris [1999]), where the agent holds ambiguous beliefs regarding the distribution of the return process of one arm and is certain about the other one. The DM entertains Multiplier preferences...

We introduce a learning framework in which a principal seeks to determine the ability of a strategic agent. The principal assigns a test consisting of a finite sequence of tasks. The test is adaptive: each task that is assigned can depend on the agent's past performance. The probability of...

We present two models of how people form beliefs that are based on machine learning theory.We illustrate how these models shed new insight into observed human phenomena by showing how polarized beliefs can arise even when people are exposed to almost identical sources of information. In our...

This paper studies social learning and optimal pricing in the presence of location-based social networks, such as Foursquare. We provide an analytic model to resolve the following questions: (1) What is the optimal pricing strategy in location-based networks? (2) How do different pricing...

We study evolutionary learning processes through social networks. We show that network heterogeneity, in particular scale-freeness, enhances social learning by studying a model in which an agent set on a network imitates the strategy only from the neighborhood. Further, in order to determine...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naively update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors' opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...