This short paper argues that rationally motivated coordination between agents is an important ingredient to understand the current economic crisis. We argue that changes in parameters that model the structure of a macro-economy or financial markets are not exogenous but arise as agents adopt...

The literature on learning in unknown environments emphasises reinforcing on actions which produce positive results. But, in some cases, success requires shifting from a currently successful actions to others. We examine, experimentally and theoretically in a very simple framework, how...

The economic crisis is also a crisis for economic theory. Most analyses of the evolution of the crisis invoke three themes, contagion, networks and trust, yet none of these play a major role in standard macroeconomic models. What is needed is a theory in which these aspects are central. The...

In this paper, we reexamine a bias revealed by Kunz et al. (2017) regarding structured financial products known as barrier reverse convertibles (BRCs) with worst-of payout characteristics. Namely, using a nonincentivized survey of investor risk perceptions, Kunz et al. (2017) found that when...