The Big Problem of Small Change offers the first credible and analytically sound explanation of how a problem that dogged monetary authorities for hundreds of years was finally solved. Two leading economists, Thomas Sargent and François Velde, examine the evolution of Western European economies...

For a Markov decision problem in which unknown transition probabilities serve as hidden state variables, we study the quality of two approximations to the decision rule of a Bayesian who each period updates his subjective distribu- tion over the transition probabilities by Bayes’ law. The...