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 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...

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...

We formulate a simple quantum decision model of the Ellsberg paradox. We report the results of an experiment we performed to test the matching probabilities predicted by this model using an incentive compatible method. We find that the theoretical predictions of the model are in conformity with...

This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of...

We use a unique hand collected data set of 6 258 auctions from the online football manager game Hattrick to study micro-patterns of reserve price formation. We find that chosen reserve prices exhibit both, very sophisticated and irrational" behavior by the sellers. Reserve prices pick up the...

The weak rationality principle is not an empirical statement but a heuristic rule of how to proceed in social sciences. It is a necessary ingredient of any ?understanding? social science in the Weberian sense. In this paper, first this principle and its role in economic theorizing is discussed....

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...