The public phase of a capital campaign is typically launched with the announcement of a large seed donation. Andreoni (1998) argues that such a fundraising strategy may be particularly effective when funds are being raised for projects that have fixed production costs. The reason is that the...

Consistent with nonprofit fundraising practices, donation visibility has been shown to increase giving. While concern for status is used to explain this response, the authors argue that this explanation relies on the assumption that giving signals only income or generosity. When giving signals...

We study adaptive learning behavior in a sequence of n-period endowment overlapping generations economies with fiat currency, where n refers to the number of periods in agents' lifetimes. Agents initially have heterogeneous beliefs and seek to form multi-step-ahead forecasts of future prices...

We introduce adaptive learning behavior into a general equilibrium lifecycle economy with capital accumulation. Agents form forecasts of the rate of return to capital assets using least squares autoregressions on past data. We show that, in contrast to the perfect foresight dynamics, the...

Learning is introduced into a sequence of large square endowment economies indexed by n, in which agents live n periods. Young agents need to forecast n - 1 periods ahead in these models in order to make consumption decisions, and thus these models constitute multi-step ahead systems. Real time...

We include learning in a standard equilibrium business cycle model with explicit growth. We use the model to study how the economy's agents could learn in real time about the important trend-changing events of the postwar era in the U.S., such as the productivity slowdown, increased labor force...

We study a general equilibrium model where the multiplicity of stationary periodic perfect foresight equilibria is pervasive. We investigate the extent of which agents can learn to coordinate on stationary perfect foresight cycles. The example economy, taken from Grandmont (1985), is an...

We study a model of economic growth and development with a threshold externality. The model has one steady state with a low and stagnant level of income per capita and another steady state with a high and growing level of income per capita. Both of these steady states are locally stable under...

Genetic algorithms have been used by economists to model the process by which a population of heterogeneous agents learn how to optimize a given objective. However, most general equilibrium models in use today presume that agents already know how to optimize. If agents face any uncertainty, it...