In Keynes’ beauty contest, agents have to choose actions in accordance with an expected fundamental value and with the conventional value expected to be set by the market. In doing so, agents respond to a fundamental and to a coordination motive respectively, the prevalence of either motive...

Financial markets are known for overreacting to public information. Central banks can reduce this overreaction either by disclosing information to a fraction of market participants only (partial publicity) or by disclosing information to all participants but with ambiguity (partial...

The disaster myopia hypothesis is a theoretical argument that may explain why crises are a recurrent event. Under very optimistic circumstances, investors disregard any relevant information concerning the increasing degree of risk. Agents’ propensity to underestimate the probability of adverse...

One of the most striking consequences of the recent episode of sovereign debt market stress in the Eurozone has been the increase in the share of public debt held by the domestic sector in fragile economies. First, we identify the shocks that explain most of the variation in this share in an...

We use laboratory experiments with human subjects to test the relevance of different inflation targeting regimes. In particular and within the standard New Keynesian model, we evaluate to what extent communication of the inflation target is relevant to the success of inflation targeting. We find...

The weight assigned to public information in Keynesian beauty contest depends on the signal precision and on the degree of strategic complementarities. This experimental study shows that the response of subjects to changes in the signal precision and in the degree of strategic complementarities...

In games with strategic complementarities, public information about the state of the world has a larger impact on equilibrium actions than private information of the same precision, because public signals are more informative about the likely behavior of others. We present an experiment in which...

In games with strategic complementarities, public information about the state of the world has a larger impact on equilibrium actions than private information of the same precision, because the former is more informative about the likely behavior of others. This may lead to welfare-reducing...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate to what extent more transparency can reduce the occurrence of speculative attacks. It proposes a survey of the literature about the pros and cons of transparency on the exchange rate market, which is one of the main pillars of the new international financial...

This paper addresses the question whether public information destabilises the economy in the context of signals of different nature. We present an experiment on the speculative attack game of Morris and Shin (1998). Our objective is double: (i) evaluating whether public information destabilises...