This exercise offers an innovative learning mechanism to model economic agent's decision-making process using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. In particular, this AI agent is born in an economic environment with no information on the underlying economic structure and its own preference....

We propose a heuristic switching model of an asset market where the agents' choice of heuristic is consistent with their individual risk aversion. They choose between a fundamentalist and a trend-following rule to form expectations about the price of a risky asset. Given their risk aversion,...

News reports and communication are inherently constrained by space, time, and attention. As a result, news sources often condition the decision of whether to share a piece of information on the similarity between the signal and the prior belief of the audience, which generates a sample selection...

This paper experimentally studies the role of associative memory for belief formation. Realworld information signals are often embedded in memorable contexts. Thus, today’s news, and the contexts they are embedded in, may cue the selective retrieval of similar past news and hence contribute to...

The paper investigates social-learning when the information structure is not commonly known. Individuals repeatedly interact in social-learning settings with distinct information structures. In each round of interaction, they use their experience gained in past rounds to draw inferences from...

We propose a new method (implemented in an R-program) to simulate long-range daily stock-price data. The program reproduces various stylized facts much better than various parametric models from the extended GARCH-family. In particular, the empirically observed changes in unconditional variance...

We plot aggregated daily stock returns with absolute value less than x against x and show empirically that this produces a typical spoon-shaped pattern which indicates a special type of asymmetry which has not been discussed before. This pattern disappears when individual returns are averaged; it...

This article shows how to use the publicy-available firm-level surveys produced by the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) to reproduce the stylized facts that characterize firm heterogeneity and its relationship with global engagement, as established by Bernard et al. (2007) for manufacturing...

This paper introduces a formal definition and an experimental measurement of the concept of cognitive uncertainty: people's subjective uncertainty about what the optimal action is. This concept allows us to bring together and partially explain a set of behavioral anomalies identified across four...

It is common to analyze the effects of alternative monetary policy commitments under the assumption of fully model-consistent expectations. This implicitly assumes unrealistic cognitive abilities on the part of economic decision makers. The relevant question, however, is not whether the...