The difficulties in properly anticipating key economic variables may encourage decision makers to rely on experts’ forecasts. Professional forecasters, however, may not be reliable and so their forecasts must be empirically tested. This may induce experts to forecast strategically in order to...

We examine the fundamental concept of Popper’s falsifiability within an economic model in which a tester hires a potential expert to produce a theory. Payments are made contingent on the performance of the theory vis-a-vis future realizations of the data. We show that if experts are strategic,...

Theories can be produced by experts seeking a reputation for having knowledge. Hence, a tester could anticipate that theories may have been strategically produced by uninformed experts who want to pass an empirical test. We show that, with no restriction on the domain of permissible theories,...

We examine Popper's falsifiability within an economic model in which a tester hires a potential expert to produce a theory. Payments are contingent on the performance of the theory vis-a-vis data. We show that if experts are strategic, falsifiability has no power to distinguish scientific...

The difficulties in properly anticipating key economic variables may encourage decision makers to rely on experts' forecasts. Professional forecasters, however, may not be reliable and so their forecasts must be empirically tested. This may induce experts to forecast strategically in order to...

This paper studies a model in which in period 1, a decision-maker chooses a set of lotteries and in period 2, Nature chooses a lottery from the set chosen by the decision-maker and the decision-maker consumes the lottery chosen by Nature. Larger sets are interpreted as representing more...

Do elementary statistics or equilibrium theory deliver any rules of thumb regarding how we should argue in debates? We suggest a framework for normative analysis of debates. In our framework, each discussant wants the audience to believe that the actual state coincides with the discussant's...