We establish a class of fully nonlinear conditional expectations. Similarly to the usage of linear expectations when a probabilistic description of uncertainty is present, we observe analogue quantitative and qualitative properties. The type of nonlinearity captures the agents sentiments of...

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating the perceived ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs optimistically because they derive direct utility flows from holding positive beliefs. This finding provides a behavioral...

Recently, much attention has been devoted to the measurement of macroeconomic (expectation) uncertainty and its impact on aggregate economic fuctuations. This paper presents a new qualitative measure of macroeconomic expectation uncertainty based on data from a German online survey of consumer...

Many papers have reported behavioral biases in belief formation that come on top of standard game-theoretic reasoning. We show that the processes involved depend on the way participants reason about their beliefs. When they think about what everybody else or another "unspeci fied" individual is...