Overconfidence in a Career-Concerns Setting

We study the effects of overconfidence in a two-period investment-decision agency setting. Under common priors, agent risk aversion implies inefficiently low first-period investment. In our model, principal and agent disagree about the profitability of the investment decision conditional on a given public signal. An overconfident agent believes that the principal will update her beliefs upwards more often than not. As a consequence, the agent overestimates the benefits of learning from first-period investment. This implies that agent overconfidence mitigates the agency problems arising from the agent’s career concerns, even though an overconfident agent bears more project and reputational risk in equilibrium.overconfidence, heterogenous beliefs, career concerns

Estimating Risk Preferences in the Field

We survey the literature on estimating risk preferences using field data. We concentrate our attention on studies in which risk preferences are the focal object and estimating their structure is the core enterprise. We review a number of models of risk preferences—including both expected utility (EU) theory and non-EU models—that have been estimated using field data, and we highlight issues related to identification and estimation of such models using field data. We then survey the literature, giving separate treatment to research that uses individual-level data (e.g., property insurance data) and research that uses aggregate data (e.g., betting market data). We conclude by discussing directions for future research

Family Background, Self-Confidence and Economic Outcomes

In this paper we analyze the role played by self-confidence, modeled as beliefs about one's ability, in shaping task choices. We propose a model in which fully rational agents exploit all the available information to update their beliefs using Bayes' rule, eventually learning their true type. We show that when the learning process does not convergence quickly to the true ability level, even small differences in initial confidence can result in diverging patterns of human capital accumulation between otherwise identical individuals. As long as inital differences in the level of self-confidence are correlated with the socioeconomic background (as a large body of empirical evidence suggests), self-confidence turns out to be a channel through which education and earnings inequalities are transmitted across generations. Our theory suggests that cognitive tests should take place as early as possible, in order to avoid that systematic differences in self-confidence among equally talented people lead to the emergence of gaps in the accumulation of human capital.self-confidence, family background

Contractual and Organizational Structurewith Reciprocal Agents

Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based pay are substitutes. A firm endogenously determines the mix of the two sources of incentives to best induce effort from the agent. Analyzing extended versions of the model allows us to examine how organizational structure impacts the effectiveness of reciprocity and to derive specific empirical predictions. We use the UK-WERS workplace compensation data set to confirm the predictions of our extended model.optimal contracts, reciprocity, organizational structure

A behavioral macroeconomic model with endogenous boom-bust cycles and leverage dynamcis

We merge a financial market model with leverage-constrained, heterogeneous agents with a reduced-form version of the New-Keynesian standard model. Agents in both submodels are assumed to be boundedly rational. The fi nancial market model produces endogenously arising boom-bust cycles. It is also capable to generate highly non-linear deleveraging processes, fi re sales and ultimately a default scenario. Asset price booms are triggered via self-fulfilling prophecies. Asset price busts are induced by agents' choice of an increasingly fragile balance sheet structure during good times. Their vulnerability is inevitably revealed by small, randomly occurring shocks. Our transmission channel of financial market activity to the real sector embraces a recent strand of literature shedding light on the link between the active balance sheet management of financial market participants, the induced procyclical fluctuations of desired risk compensations and their final impact on the real economy. We show that a systematic central bank reaction on financial market developments dampens macroeconomic volatility considerably. Furthermore, restricting leverage in a countercyclical fashion limits the magnitude of financial cycles and hence their impact on the real economy. --behavioral economics,New-Keynesian macroeconomics,monetary policy,agent-based financial market model,leverage,macroprudential regulation,financial stability,asset price bubbles,systemic risk

Agglomeration under Forward-Looking Expectations: Potentials and Global Stability

This paper considers a class of migration dynamics with forward-looking agents in a multi-country solvable variant of the core-periphery model of Krugman (Journal of Political Economy 99 (1991)). We find that, under a symmetric externality assumption, our static model admits a potential function, which allows us to identify a stationary state that is uniquely absorbing and globally accessible under the perfect foresight dynamics whenever the degree of friction in relocation decisions is sufficiently small. In particular, when trade barriers are low enough, full agglomeration in the country with the highest barrier is the unique stable state for small frictions. New aspects in trade and tax policy that arise due to forward-looking behavior are discussed.economic geography; agglomeration; perfect foresight dynamics; history versus expectations; stability; potential game; equilibrium selection

Four Mode Based Dialogue Management with Modified POMDP Model

This thesis proposes a method to manage the interaction between the user and the system dynamically, through speech or text input which updates the user goals, select system actions and calculate rewards for each system response at each time-stamp. The main focus is made on the dialog manager, which decides how to continue the dialogue. We have used POMDP technique, as it maintains a belief distribution on the dialogue states based on the observations over the dialogue even in a noisy environment. Four contextual control modes are introduced in dialogue management for decision-making mechanism, and to keep track of machine behaviour for each dialogue state. The result obtained proves that our proposed framework has overcome the limitations of prior POMDP methods, and exactly understands the actual intention of the users within the available time, providing very interactive conversation between the user and the computer

The Economics of Competition Policy: Recent Developments and Cautionary Notes in Antitrust and Regulation

Competition policy has become more prominent while the thinking underlying those policies has undergone substantial revision. We survey advances in antitrust economics and the economics of regulation. Increasing reliance on non-cooperative game theory as a foundation for antitrust has led to rethinking conventional approaches. We review some of these contributions in the context of mergers, vertical restraints, and competition in "network industries." Turning to regulation, we review standard rationales and identify some major contemporary refinements, with examples of the motives behind them and their application. After brief thoughts on privatization, we conclude with suggestions on design and implementation, with some observations on whether these developments are as valuable in the corridors of policy as they may be in the halls of academe.