Economic theory reduces the concept of rationality to internal consistency. As far as beliefs are concerned, rationality is equated with having a prior belief over a quot;Grand State Spacequot;, describing all possible sources of uncertainties. We argue that this notion is too weak in some...

Economic modeling assumes, for the most part, that agents are Bayesian, that is, that they entertain probabilistic beliefs, objective or subjective, regarding any event in question. We argue that the formation of such beliefs calls for a deeper examination and for explicit modeling. Models of...

Economic theory reduces the concept of rationality to internal consistency. The practice of economics, however, distinguishes between rational and irrational beliefs. There is therefore an interest in a theory of rational beliefs, and of the process by which beliefs are generated and justified....

Economic modeling assumes, for the most part, that agents are Bayesian, that is, that they entertain probabilistic beliefs, objective or subjective, regarding any event in question. We argue that the formation of such beliefs calls for a deeper examination and for explicit modeling. Models of...

Prior research on quot;strategic votingquot; has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous,...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model where firms are imperfectly informed. We estimate the model through likelihood-based methods and find that it can explain the highly persistent real effects of monetary disturbances that are documented by a benchmark VAR. The...

We formulate a notion of stable outcomes in matching problems with one-sided asymmetric information. The key conceptual problem is to formulate a notion of a blocking pair that takes account of the inferences that the uninformed agent might make from the hypothesis that the current allocation is...

This paper studies a search model of the labor market where firms have private information about the quality of their vacancies, they can costlessly communicate with unemployed workers before the beginning of the application process, but the content of the communication does not constitute a...

People reason about uncertainty with deliberately incomplete models, including only the most relevant variables. How do people hampered by different, incomplete views of the world learn from each other?We introduce a model of “model-based inference.” Model-based reasoners partition an...

A Principal appoints a committee of partially informed experts to choose a policy. The experts' preferences are aligned with each other but conflict with hers. We study whether she gains from banning committee members from communicating or \deliberating" before voting. Our main result is that if...