Onderzoek van de Dynamiek van Complexe Systemen

Een NWO Thema belicht

Georganiseerd door Onderzoeksgroepen

Simulatie & Methodologie voor Complexe Maatschappelijke Problemen

27 november 14.00 – 17.00 uur

Zalencentrum Bolognalaan 2, Utrecht

Inleiding door Cars Hommes

(UvA, Department of Quantitative Economics ASE)

Heterogeneous Expectations in Complex Economic Systems

Some Evidence from the Lab

ABSTRACT.

The economy can be viewed as a complex adaptive system with many agents (consumers, firms, investors) interacting at the micro-level, creating emergent behaviour at the macro-level. A key difference with the natural sciences however is that, in socio-economic systems the ``atoms can think''. Agents base their decisions upon market expectations, learn from the past and adapt their behaviour accordingly. But how do individuals form expectations? This talk summarizes recent evidence from ``learning to forecast'' laboratory experiments with human subjects to study individual expectations and their interaction. Are individual expectations heterogeneous or do subjects learn to coordinate on a common prediction rule? How do individual expectations interact at the micro level and which aggregate outcome do they co-create at the macro level? In particular, we will discuss whether the evidence from lab experiments justifies a heterogeneous expectations hypothesis.