Expectations and Indeterminacy of Monetary Equilibria in Experimental Economics

人们做什么(即工作、储蓄或消费)在一定程度上取决于他们对未来的预期。他们的行为反过来又会影响未来的实际情况。经济行为的理性预期模型基于一个关键要求，即一个人对未来的预期与他们当前决策的逻辑后果是一致的。理性预期均衡模型的发展对许多宏观经济现象有了更好的理解。尽管如此，当前的经济理论留下了一些关键问题没有得到回答。具体地说，存在多对相互一致的行动和预期的经济模型会产生模棱两可的预测和政策处方。如果知道人们是如何从期望中学习的，这个问题就可以解决。例如，在当前的恶性通胀动态模型中，不可能以合理的精确度知道削减政府赤字对通胀的影响。为了更好地了解通胀的原因并找到有效的对策，有必要更多地了解人们是如何形成预期的。这个项目的目的是开发创新的实验室方法，并将它们应用于预期形成、通货膨胀和政府赤字的分析。

What people do (i.e., work, save, or spend) depends in part on what they expect the future to be. Their actions, in turn, influence what actually happens in the future. Rational expectations models of economic behavior are based on a key requirement that a person's expectations about the future be consistent with the logical consequences of their current decisions. A better understanding of many macroeconomic phenomena has been gained by the development of rational-expectations equilibrium models. Nonetheless, current economic theory leaves some crucial questions unanswered. Specifically, economic models in which multiple pairs of mutually consistent actions and expectations exist yield ambiguous predictions and policy prescriptions. This problem could be resolved if it were known how people learn from expectations. For example, in current models of the dynamics of hyperinflation, it impossible to know, with any reasonable precision, the impact of reducing government deficits on inflation. In order to better understand the causes of inflation and to discover effective counter measures, it is necessary to learn much more about how people form expectations. The purpose of this project is to develop innovative laboratory methods and to apply them to the analysis of expectation formation, inflation, and government deficits.