The economic entities today are struggling to find the most effective way of combining the resources they have, tangible or intangible, in order to produce and sale the most wanted products, their purpose is to gain and keep the highest share of the market. These intangible resources, in our...

We analyse a long panel of households’ stock market beliefs to gain insights into the nature of their expectations formation processes. We classify respondents into one of five groups based on their data and estimate group-wise models of expectations formation. Two of the groups are at...

The paper presents a model of housing and credit cycles featuring distorted beliefs and comovement and mutual reinforcement between house price expectations and price developments via credit expansion/contraction. Positive (negative) development in house prices fuels optimism (pessimism) and...

Exploiting the natural experiment of the German reunification, we examine how consumers adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. We document that East Germans expect higher inflation and make larger forecast errors than West Germans even decades after reunification....

Die Situation von Kleinanlegern* auf dem Finanzmarkt ist in Deutschland weitgehend unerforscht. Mit Blick darauf beleuchtet der folgende Beitrag auf Grundlage der Ergebnisse eines qualitativen soziologischen Forschungsprojekts drei wesentliche Dimensionen ihrer Anlagepraxis. Es geht erstens um...

We study the emergence of bubbles in a laboratory experiment with large groups of individuals. The realized price is the aggregation of the forecasts of a group of individuals, with positive expectations feedback through speculative demand. When prices deviate from fundamental value, a random...

The paper studies a dynamic communication game in the presence of adverse selection and career concerns. A forecaster of privately known competence, who cares about his reputation, chooses the timing of the forecast regarding the outcome of some future event. We find that in all equilibria in a...

It has been argued that guilt aversion (the aversion to violate others’ expectations) and the compliance to descriptive social norms (the aversion to act differently than others in the same situation) are important drivers of human behavior. We show in a formal model that both motives are...

Using a representative online panel from the US, we examine how individuals’ macroeconomic expectations causally affect their personal economic prospects and their behavior. To exogenously vary respondents’ expectations we provide them with different professional forecasts about the...

Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption "habits" to explain the substantial persistence of macroeconomic consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in the microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...