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(Wp 2020-02) Belief Reversals As Phase Transitions And Economic Fragility: A Complexity Theory Of Financial Cycles With Reflexive Agents, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This paper aims to contribute to the analysis of expectations and belief reversals in an evolutionary and complexity economics framework. It formulates its analysis in terms of the concept of reflexivity, drawing on the ideas regarding reflexivity in financial markets of George Soros, and lays out a model of how a financial cycle expresses a systematic pattern of interacting feedback effects. The paper develops this analysis as a complex interaction between sets of heterogeneous expectations derived from the behavior of reflexive economic agents. Positive and negative feedback phases in a cycle are distinguished and associated with boom and bust stages …