I show how irrational ideas and rumors can drive asset prices - not because anyone believes them, but because they are commonly known without being common knowledge. The phenomenon is driven by short-term market participants who are well-informed about the information that others have, and who...

Economists tend to assume that agents maximize their expected utility. However, many different experiments have questioned expected utility maximization by showing that human behavior can be characterized as random. This paper proposes Thompson Sampling as a theory of human behavior across very...

Heterogenous agents models have proven to be capable of explaining price dynamics on speculative markets. In general, this is achieved by allowing time series properties to be state dependent. This paper investigates whether market participants' expectations already reflect these time varying...

Standard program evaluations implicitly assume that individuals are perfectly informed about the considered policy change and the related institutional rules. This seems not very plausible in many contexts, as diverse examples show. However, evidence on how incomplete information affects the...

We use surveys of German households and firms to study the extent of information frictions among different groups of economic agents. Firms' expectations about the central bank policy rate, inflation, and aggregate unemployment are more aligned with expert forecasts and less dispersed than...

The present paper studies the effect of monetary policy on inflation and output within a New Keynesian model with Experience-Based Learning (EBL) that renders expectations heterogeneous across age groups. Under EBL, the age-distribution directly affects the composition of aggregate expectations...