A hierarchy is considered in which those agents who perform better advance to higher levels When agents are heterogeneous and endowed with simple behavioral rules Harrington (1998a) showed that agents at high levels tend to be rigid in the sense that their behavior is unresponsive to their...

A vast literature has emerged using Taylor rules to analyze monetary policy Although very attractive both theoretically and empirically such rules imply a mechanical response by the policy variable to fundamental ones This study looks for empirical evidence of a more sophisticated monetary...

This paper investigates how monetary policy can help to avoid the liquidity trap by studying the experience of Japan. First, I analyze how the Bank of Japan conducted interest rate policy over the 1990s as the economy entered a deflationary slump. I use a new method of estimating the policy rule...

This paper states necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence, uniqueness, and updating according to Bayes?rule, of subjective probabilities representing individuals?beliefs. The approach is preference based, and the result is an axiomatic subjective expected utility model of Bayesian...

The negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. However, the academic literature has raised two difficulties with it, one challenging its purported work incentives and the other suggesting the possible superiority of work...

We consider processes in which new technologies and forms of behavior are transmitted through social and geographic networks Agents adopt behaviors based on a combination of their inherent payoff and their local popularity (the number of neighbors who have adopted them) subject to some random...

This paper examines the relationship between household balance sheets consumer purchases and expectations We find robust empirical relationships between balance sheet measures and spending but we do find that unemployment expectations are robustly correlated with spending We then construct a...

Banning affirmative action from college admissions decisions cannot prevent an admissions office that cares about diversity from achieving it through channels other than the explicit consideration of race We construct a model of college admissions where candidates from two groups with different...

Consider a two-person infinitely-repeated game in which one player is either a normal rational type or a commitment type that authomatically plays a fixed repeated-game strategy When her true type is private information a rational type may want to develop a reputation as a commitment type by...

This paper invokes the axiomatic approach to explore the notion of growing awareness in the context of decision making under uncertainty. It introduces a new approach to modeling the expanding universe of a decision maker in the wake of becoming aware of new consequences, new acts, and new links...