SPP 1859: Experience and Expectation: Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour

经济决策是在相当不确定的复杂环境中进行的。为了减少这种不确定性，经济行为者依赖于对关键经济变量未来发展的预期。本优先方案的中心目的是调查这些期望是如何形成的。该方案的基本假设是，预期的形成不是一个统一、标准化和不随时间变化的过程，而是取决于具体的历史背景。三个问题将主导我们的研究：第一，历史经验如何塑造对未来的预期？第二，期望值是否会因文化、制度或技术的差异而在空间和/或时间上变化？第三，由于经济危机或外部冲击，短期内预期如何变化？为了回答这些问题，我们邀请了来自行为科学，法律，心理学和社会学的学者参加。这一跨学科方法的共同目标是研究期望形成的历史过程。这一计划的中心任务将是确定新的历史来源，这将有助于我们重建期望形成的经验过程。例如，日记，信件和其他个人记录将提供人们如何解释某些经济状况以及他们如何形成预期的见解。私人家庭账簿和消费调查可以就经济行为实际变化的时间和原因得出结论。类似的来源，如董事会会议记录或商业信函，也可以找到公司，中央银行，研究机构或政府。媒体分析有望提供有关公共叙事如何影响过去个人期望的尚未挖掘的信息。也可以分析实际的经济行为，以便了解潜在的预期。例如，公司专利组合的组成不断变化，这提供了有关管理人员和研究人员对未来技术发展道路的预期的信息。

Economic decision-making takes place in a complex environment under considerable uncertainty. To reduce this uncertainty economic actors rely on expectations about the future development of key economic variables. The central purpose of this Priority Programme is to investigate how these expectations are formed. Underlying the programme is the basic hypothesis that the formation of expectation is not a uniform, standardised and time-invariant process but depends on specific historical contexts.The Priority Programme aims at a close integration of historical and economic methods. Three questions shall dominate our research: First, how does historical experience shape expectations of the future? Second, do expectations change across space and/or time because of differences in culture, institutions, or technology? Third, how do expectations change in the short-term due to economic crises or exogenous shocks? To answer these questions, we invite scholars from behavioural science, law, psychology and sociology to participate. The common goal of this interdisciplinary approach is the study of historical processes of expectation formation.A central task of this programme will be to identify new historical sources which will help us reconstruct empirically processes of expectation formation. For example, diaries, letters and other personal records will provide insights into how people interpret certain economic situations and how they form their expectations. Private household books and consumption surveys allow conclusions on the timing and causes of actual changes in economic behaviour. Comparable sources such as minutes of board meetings or business correspondence can also be found for companies, central banks, research institutes, or governments. Media analysis promises to provide yet unmined information about how public narratives have influenced individual expectations in the past. It might be also possible to analyse actual economic behaviour in order to understand the underlying expectations. For example, the changing composition of corporate patent portfolios provides information about which technological development paths managers and researchers anticipated for the future.