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Economic Theory Commons™

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2020

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Articles 151 - 154 of 154

Full-Text Articles in Economic Theory

Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough Jan 2020

Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Working Papers

The ability of markets to aggregate dispersed information is a cornerstone of economics and finance. In a seminal experiment, Plott and Sunder (1988) offer support for the rational expectations hypothesis. However, recent laboratory experiments have called into question the robustness of those initial results. In this paper, we offer the first attempt to directly replicate key findings of the original study. Failing to replicate their results, the post-study probability that market performance is better described by rational expectations than the prior information (Walrasian) model is low. Given this result, we introduce a new treatment that implements a market structure consistent …


An Experimental Comparison Of News Vending And Price Gouging, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova Jan 2020

An Experimental Comparison Of News Vending And Price Gouging, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova

ESI Working Papers

The newsvendor problem is a workhorse model in operation management research. We introduce a related game that operates in the price dimension rather than the inventory dimension: the price gouging game. Using controlled laboratory experiments, we compare news vending and price gouging behavior. We replicate the standard pull-to-center effect for news vending and find that the equivalent pattern occurs with price gouging. Further, we find that the pull-to-center is asymmetric both for newsvendors and price gougers. More broadly, the experimental results reveal that choices are similar across the theoretically isomorphic games, suggesting that observed behavior in newsvendor experiments is representative …


Reference Dependent Prices In Bargaining: An Experimental Examination Of Precise First Offers, Erik O. Kimbrough, David Porter, Mark Schneider Jan 2020

Reference Dependent Prices In Bargaining: An Experimental Examination Of Precise First Offers, Erik O. Kimbrough, David Porter, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

Evidence from psychology and marketing suggests that those who make a "precise" first offer in bargaining get a better deal than those who make a "round" first offer. We report on a series of experiments designed to test for and improve our understanding of the "precise first offer" (PFO) effect in bargaining and whether it likely reflects rational optimizing or equilibrium behavior. Our experimental treatments vary whether decisions are incentivized and whether the PFO effect can emerge as an equilibrium of a cheap-talk signaling game. We find evidence of a PFO effect when subjects read a vignette and make unincentivized …


Why We Use A New Currency: The Role Of Trust And Control In Explaining The Perception And Usage Of Bitcoin, Joseph B. Walton Jan 2020

Why We Use A New Currency: The Role Of Trust And Control In Explaining The Perception And Usage Of Bitcoin, Joseph B. Walton

Theses and Dissertations

Social media, e-commerce, global peer-to-peer technologies, and the near ubiquity of computers and smartphones allow people to interact, trust, and exchange value across traditional socio-economic control boundaries and over significant distances. Since the creation in 2008 of a new cryptographic currency system called Bitcoin, a financial technology market sector of about 250 billion USD has rapidly emerged, raising questions about the nature of currency in society and whether new types of non-national money are warranted and viable. This debate has pitted heterodox economic interests against orthodox economic interests while it has rekindled interest in theories that view money as a …