Cheap Talk, Gullibility, and Welfare in an Environmental Taxation Game

We consider a simple dynamic model of environmental taxation that exhibits time inconsistency. There are two categories of firms, Believers, who take the tax announcements made by the Regulator to face value, and Non-Believers, who perfectly anticipate the Regulator's decisions, albeit at a cost. The proportion of Believers and Non- Believers changes over time depending on the relative profits of both groups. We show that the Regulator can use misleading tax announcements to steer the economy to an equilibrium that is Pareto superior to the solutions usually suggested in the literature. Depending upon the initial proportion of Believers, the Regulator may prefer a fast or a low speed of reaction of the firms to differences in Believers/Non-Believers profits.Environmental policy, Emissions taxes, Time inconsistency, Heterogeneous agents, Bounded rationality, Learning, Multiple equilibria, Stackelberg games

Production and Finance in EURACE

EURACE is a major FP6 STREP project aiming at constructing anexhaustive agent-based model of the European economy, populated by avery large number of sophisticated, autonomous agents. The EURACEmodel, which has an explicit spatial structure, includes all the majormarkets considered in quantitative macroeconomic modelling (consumergoods, investment goods, labour, credit and finance). It offers aunique opportunity for studying, from a new perspective, theempirically observed but theoretically poorly understood link betweenthe real and the financial sphere of a modern economy. After summarilypresenting the main features of EURACE, this paper describes in moredetail the newly developed financial management module thatintermediates between the real and the financial spheres in EURACE. Ina nutshell, this module defines the link between the hiring andinvestment behavior of the firms as a function of the revenues theyobtain by selling their products, of the money they can raise on thecredit and financial markets, of their dividend policy, and othermajor aspects of financial decision-making.Agent-based macroeconomics; Financial policy; Parallel computing

Learning Benevolent Leadership in a Heterogenous Agents Economy

This paper studies the potential commitment value of cheap talkinflation announcements in an agent-based dynamic extension of theKydland-Prescott model. In every period, the policy maker makesa non-binding inflation announcement before setting the actualinflation rate. It updates its decisions using individual evolutionarylearning. The private agents can choose between two differentforecasting strategies: They can either set their forecast equal tothe announcement or compute it, at a cost, using an adaptive learningscheme. They switch between these two strategies as a function ofinformation about the associated payoffs they obtain throughword-of-mouth, choosing always the currently most favorable one.Weshow that the policy maker is able to sustain a situation with apositive but fluctuating fraction of believers. This equilibrium isPareto superior to the outcome predicted by standard theory. Theinfluence of changes in key parameters and the impact of transmissionof information among nonbelievers on the dynamics are studied.time inconsistency; bounded rationality; forecast and agentheterogeneity; cheap talk; evolutionary learning

EURACE: A Massively Parallel Agent-Based Model of the European Economy

EURACE is a major European attempt to construct an agent-based model of the European economy with a very large population of autonomous, purposive agents interacting in a complicated economic environment. To create it, major advances are needed, in particular in terms of economic modeling and software engineering.In this paper, we describe the general structure of the economic model developed for EURACE and present the Flexible Large-scale Agent Modeling Environment (FLAME) that will be used to describe the agents and run the model on massively parallel supercomputers. Illustrative simulations with a simplifiedmodel based on EURACE's labour market module are presented.Agent-based Computational Economics; X-Machines; Parallelcomputation.

On the determination of macroeconomic policies with robust outcome

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Production and Finance in EURACE

EURACE is a major FP6 STREP project aiming at constructing anexhaustive agent-based model of the European economy, populated by avery large number of sophisticated, autonomous agents. The EURACEmodel, which has an explicit spatial structure, includes all the majormarkets considered in quantitative macroeconomic modelling (consumergoods, investment goods, labour, credit and finance). It offers aunique opportunity for studying, from a new perspective, theempirically observed but theoretically poorly understood link betweenthe real and the financial sphere of a modern economy. After summarilypresenting the main features of EURACE, this paper describes in moredetail the newly developed financial management module thatintermediates between the real and the financial spheres in EURACE. Ina nutshell, this module defines the link between the hiring andinvestment behavior of the firms as a function of the revenues theyobtain by selling their products, of the money they can raise on thecredit and financial markets, of their dividend policy, and othermajor aspects of financial decision-making

Cheating for the common good in a macroeconomic policy game

Se presenta un juego repetido que modeliza la interacción entre un gobierno optimizador y el sector privado, representado por un continuo de agentes heterogéneos y atomísticos. Abstract: This paper presents a simple repeated-game model of interaction between an optimizing government and the private sector. Two polar cases are considered: (a) the private sector is represented by a single agent; and (b) there is a continuum of heterogenous atomistic private agents. In both cases, the government starts each repetition by making a non-binding announcement about its future actions. The players have complete and perfect information, with one exception: the private agents do not know whether or not the government will act as announced. Thus, each private agent i either behaves with probability πi as if it trusted the announcement, or plays with probability 1 − πi as a Stackelberg leader. After observing the reaction of the private sector, the governmen