Consider an infinitely repeated game where each player is characterized by a "type" which may be unknown to the other players in the game. Suppose further that each player's belief about others is independent of that player's type. Impose an absolute continuity condition on the ex ante beliefs...

We have developed a method for directly learning relative preferences from histories of comparison information without an intermediate utility computation. Our method infers preferences that are rational in a psychological sense, where agent choices result from Bayesian inference of what to do...

We offer a model to explain why groups of people sometimes converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, even though they can discuss the outcomes of their choices. Models of informational herding or cascades have examined how rational individuals learn by observing predecessors' actions,...

I propose a flexible non-parametric method using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to estimate a generalized model of expectation formation. This approach does not rely on restrictive assumptions of functional forms and parametric methods yet nests the standard approaches of empirical studies on...

This paper extends the job market signaling model of Spence (1973) by allowing firms to learn the ability of their employees over time. Contrary to the model without employer learning, we find that the Intuitive Criterion does not always select a unique separating equilibrium. When the Intuitive...

We study firms' incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining asymmetric business cycles. When the economy has been in a boom in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with an optimistic belief,...

This paper proposes a behavioral model of social learning that unies various forms of inferential reasoning in one hierarchy of types. Iterated best responses that are based on uninformative level-0 play lead to the following of the private information (level-1), to the following of the majority...

The paper contrasts theories that explain diverse belief by asymmetric private information (in short PI) with theories which postulate agents use subjective heterogenous beliefs (in short HB). We focus on problems where agents forecast aggregates such as profit rate of the Samp;P500 and our...

We examine an analyst with career concerns making cheap talk recommendations to a sequence of traders, each of whom possesses private information concerning the analyst's ability. The recommendations of the analyst influence asset prices that are then used to evaluate the analyst. An endogeneity...

We study the descriptiveness of the “unravelling” prediction in the 1890s streetcar industry. In this historical setting, capital-intensive streetcar companies gain the opportunity to disclose their earnings to dispersed investors via a new, quarterly newspaper supplement. We document that a...