This note shows that in a large class of El Farol models the failure of agents to find rational prediction rules which stabilize is not due to a non-existence of perfect rules, but rather to the failure of agents to identify the correct class of predictors from which the perfect ones can be...

People do not only feel guilt from not living up to others expectations (Battigalli and Dufwenberg (2007)), but may also like to exceed them. We propose a model that generalizes the guilt aversion model to capture the possibility of positive surprises when making gifts. A model extension allows...

Using a new daily dataset for all stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange, we study the evolution of information asymmetry during runs on financial institutions and the subsequent liquidity freeze of October 1907 - one of the severest financial crises of the 20\textsuperscript{th} century....

Learning that others earn more may reduce individual well-being but can also be informative about the own income prospects. This paper provides experimental evidence that separates direct effects of income comparisons on well-being and informational effects from observing changes in the income...

A policy maker (PM) needs information that only financial market traders know in order to implement his optimal policy, and traders may aggregate this information in asset prices. In such a setting, prices can become uninformative, because the PM reacts to information contained in prices,...

Using the microdata of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we evaluate whether U.S. consumers form macroeconomic expectations consistent with different economic concepts. We observe that 50\% of consumers have expectations consistent with the Income Fisher equation, 46\% with the Taylor rule and...

This paper analyzes the impact of job insecurity perceptions on individual well-being. While previous studies on the subject have used the concept of perceived job insecurity rather arbitrarily, the present analysis explicitly takes into account individual perceptions about both the likelihood...

Several empirical studies derive that personal positions with respect to policy measures are dominated by ideology instead of narrow self-interest. In the present field study we carried out a telephone survey with 1.003 respondents all over Austria. Instead of only measuring self-interest...

In this paper we explore the degree of anchoring of inflation expectations of consumers by analysing the comovement in short- and long-run expectations. If inflation expectations are firmly anchored, a transitory shock should influence the short-run inflation expectations but not effect long-run...

A frequent feature of information structures is that they generate signals which are not mutually independent, but rather rely on a common set of underlying information. Using a simple experimental design, we show that in such contexts many people neglect correlations in the updating process,...