Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/26819 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
Ruhr Economic Papers No. 54
Publisher: 
Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (RWI), Essen
Abstract: 
Previous experimental investigations have shown that expectations are not perfectly rational due to bias. Traditional adaptive models, however, in many cases do not perfectly describe the formation of expectations either. This paper makes two contributions to the experimental literature on the formation of expectations: First, we investigate whether subjects who have more information about the economic model than in previous studies also form biased expectations. Second, we argue that in some cases macroeconomic expectations might be formed by the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic, which is well known in psychology. We find that subjects' expectations are biased although the design might be more favorable to rational expectations. The anchoring-and-adjustment model of expectations gets some support by our data, but the best model encompasses both the anchoring-and-adjustment model and the traditional adaptive model.
Subjects: 
Expectations
heuristics
beliefs
mental models
macroeconomic experiment
JEL: 
D84
D83
C99
ISBN: 
978-3-86788-057-2
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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