A key open question in economics is the practical, portable modeling of bounded rationality. In this short note, I report on ongoing progress that is more fully developed elsewhere. I present some results from a new model with boundedly rational features in which the decision-maker (DM) builds a...

In many markets consumer biases do not affect prices, since competition forces firms to price their products close to marginal cost; competition protects the consumer. We show that noisy consumer product evaluations undermine the force of competition, enabling firms to charge high mark-ups in...

Some consumers fail to observe shrouded product attributes when they buy a new product. For example, an account holder may not know their bank's fee schedule. Firms will choose high shrouded fees and compete to attract consumers with loss-leader base goods: e.g., banks will offer free gifts for...

This paper presents a framework for analyzing how bounded rationality affects monetary and fiscal policy. The model is a tractable and parsimonious enrichment of the widely-used New Keynesian model – with one main new “cognitive discounting” parameter, which quantifies how poorly agents...

This paper proposes a model in which the decision maker builds an optimally simplified representation of the world which is "sparse," i.e., uses few parameters that are non-zero. Sparsity is formulated so as to lead to well-behaved, convex maximization problems. The agent's choice of a...

A key open question in economics is the practical, portable modeling of bounded rationality. In this short note, I report ongoing progress that is more fully developed elsewhere. I present some results from a new model in which the decision-maker builds a simplified representation of the world....

This paper defines and analyzes a "sparse max" operator, which is a less than fully attentive and rational version of the traditional max operator. The agent builds (as economists do) a simplified model of the world which is sparse, considering only the variables of first-order importance. His...

"This paper proposes a model in which the decision maker builds an optimally simplified representation of the world which is "sparse," i.e., uses few parameters that are non-zero. Sparsity is formulated so as to lead to well-behaved, convex maximization problems. The agent's choice of a...