Learning benevolent leadership in a heterogenous agents economy

Jasmina Arifovic, Herbert Dawid, Christophe Deissenberg and Olena Kostyshyna

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2010, vol. 34, issue 9, 1768-1790

Abstract: This paper studies the potential commitment value of cheap talk announcements in an agent-based dynamic extension of the Kydland-Prescott model. In every period, the policy maker makes a non-binding inflation announcement before setting the actual inflation rate. It updates its decisions using individual evolutionary learning. The private agents can choose between two different forecasting strategies: They can either set their forecast equal to the announcement or use an adaptive learning scheme to (potentially) forecast the true inflation. They switch between these two strategies as a function of information about the associated payoffs they obtain through word-of-mouth, choosing always the currently most favorable one. While all agents using the first strategy make the same forecast, those using the second strategy may generate different individual forecasts. In spite of the complexity of the environment, the boundedly rational policy maker learns to sustain a situation with a positive but fluctuating fraction of believers. This outcome is Pareto superior to the outcome predicted by standard theory. Interestingly enough, the actions taken by the policy maker undergo marked qualitative changes as a function of the prevailing heterogeneity among and learning characteristics of the private agents.

Keywords: Time; inconsistency; Bounded; rationality; Forecast; and; agent; heterogeneity; Cheap; talk; Evolutionary; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165-1889(10)00153-3
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Learning Benevolent Leadership in a Heterogenous Agents Economy (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:34:y:2010:i:9:p:1768-1790

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is currently edited by J. Bullard, C. Chiarella, H. Dawid, C. H. Hommes, P. Klein and C. Otrok

More articles in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().