This paper describes a classroom experiment demonstrating the price mechanism and the clearing of markets in an endowment economy. Participants receive random endowments of two goods they may trade in order to maximize a given utility function. A market-clearing price is reached when no mutually...

Crockett, Spear and Sunder [2006] propose a simple learning rule through which an informationally decentralized, repeated, static pure exchange economy populated by agents with standard neoclassical preferences will coordinate on a competitive equilibrium. In this paper a laboratory market is...

Crockett, Spear and Sunder [2005] propose an algorithm whereby boundedly rational agents with standard neoclassical preferences learn competitive equilibrium in a repeated static exchange economy. In this paper, a laboratory market is instituted to examine the hypothesis that people are at least...

An economy's production set is the collection of all net output vectors that the economy is capable of producing with a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. The boundary of this set is called the production possibility frontier or PPF. We show that, if the...

A country's production possibility frontier or PPF is defined as the boundary of its economy's production set in the net output space for a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. In general equilibrium theory, exogenous changes in technology or primary-factor...

We employ laboratory methods to study stability of competitive equilibrium in Scarf’s economy (International Economic Review, 1960). Tatonnement theory predicts that prices are globally unstable for this economy, i.e. unless prices start at the competitive equilibrium they oscillate without...

We employ laboratory methods to study stability of competitive equilibrium in Scarf's economy (International Economic Review, 1960). Tatonnement theory predicts that prices are globally unstable for this economy, i.e. unless prices start at the competitive equilibrium they oscillate without...

Attainment of rational expectations equilibria in asset markets calls for the price system to disseminate traders' private information to others. It is known that markets populated by asymmetrically-informed profit-motivated human traders can converge to rational expectations equilibria. This...

Our study demonstrates how agents' expectations can interact dynamically with monetary and fiscal policy at the zero lower bound. We study expectation formation near the zero lower bound using a learning-to-forecast laboratory experiment under alternative policy regimes. In our experimental...

We implement a dynamic asset pricing experiment in the spirit of Lucas (1978) with storable assets and non-storable cash. In the first treatment, we impose diminishing marginal returns to cash to incentivize consumption smoothing across periods. We find that subjects use the asset to smooth...