The adaptive learning approach has been fruitfully employed to model the formation of aggregate expectations at the macroeconomic level, as an alternative to rational expectations. This paper uses adaptive learning to understand, instead, the formation of expectations at the micro-level, by...

Agents forming adaptive expectations generally make systematic mistakes. This characterization has fostered the rejection of adaptive expectations in macroeconomics. Experimental evidence, however, shows that in complex environments human subjects frequently rely on adaptive heuristics –...

A well-known result by Vega-Redondo (1997) implies that in symmetric Cournot oligopoly, imitation leads to the Walrasian outcome where price equals marginal cost. In this paper, we show that this result is not robust to the slightest asymmetry in fixed costs. Instead of obtaining the Walrasian...

Cultural and institutional differences among nations may result in differences in the ratios of marginal costs of goods in autarchy and thus be the basis of specialization and comparative advantage, as long as these differences are not eliminated by trade. We provide an evolutionary model of...

That individuals contribute in social dilemma interactions even when contributing is costly is a well-established observation in the experimental literature. Since a contributor is always strictly worse off than a non-contributor the question is raised if an intrinsic motivation to contribute...

Recent research documents mounting evidence for sizable and persistent biases in individual labor market expectations. This paper incorporates subjective expectations into a general equilibrium labor market model and studies the implications of biased expectations for wage bargaining, vacancy...

COVID-19 hit firms by surprise. In a high frequency, representative panel of German firms, the business outlook declined and business uncertainty increased only when the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic led to domestic policy changes: The announcement of nation-wide school closures on March 13...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...

We study how the differential timing of local lockdowns due to COVID-19 causally affects households' spending and macroeconomic expectations at the local level using several waves of a customized survey with more than 10,000 respondents. About 50% of survey participants report income and wealth...