an economic theory of self control the concept of self control is incorporated in a theory of individual intertemporal choice by modeling the individual as an organization the individual at a point in time is assumed to be both a farsighted planner and a myopic doer the resulting conflict is seen to be fundamentally similar to the agency conflict between the owners and managers of a firm both individuals and firms use the same techniques to mitigate the problems which the conflicts create this paper stresses the implications of this agency model and discusses as applications the effect of pensions on saving saving and the timing of income flows and individual discount rates

search layoffs and reservation wages i analyze job search models with random layoffs in which employment opportunities are characterized by a wage and some measure of risk intuition suggests that a worker ought to demand a higher wage if he is to accept a job with a higher layoff rate but this is not true in several models analyzed in the literature i demonstrate here that assumptions about what happens immediately after a layoff and after a quit are critical in determining the relation between reservation wages and risk making these assumptions explicit clarifies the reasons why different models imply quite different predictions

failures in contingent reasoning the role of uncertainty we propose a new channel to account for the difficulties of individuals with contingent reasoning the presence of uncertainty when moving from an environment with one state of known value to one with multiple possible values two changes occur first the number of values to consider increases second the value of the state is uncertain we show in an experiment that this lack of certainty or the loss of the power of certainty impedes payoff maximization and that it accounts for a substantial portion of the difficulties with contingent reasoning

rational heuristics expectations and behaviors in evolving economies with heterogeneous interacting agents we analyze the individual and macroeconomic impacts of heterogeneous expectations and action rules within an agent based model populated by heterogeneous interacting firms agents have to cope with a complex evolving economy characterized by deep uncertainty resulting from technical change imperfect information coordination hurdles and structural breaks in these circumstances we find that neither individual nor macroeconomic dynamics improve when agents replace myopic expectations with less naive learning rules our results suggest that fast and frugal robust heuristics may not be a second best option but rather rational responses in complex and changing macroeconomic environments jel c63 d8 e32 e6 o4

price setting during low and high inflation evidence from mexico this paper provides new insight into the relationship between inflation and the setting of individual prices by examining a large data set of mexican consumer prices covering episodes of both low and high inflation when the annual rate of inflation is low below 10 15 the frequency of price changes comoves weakly with inflation because movements in the frequency of price decreases and increases partly offset each other in contrast the average magnitude of price changes correlates strongly with inflation because it is sensitive to movements in the relative shares of price increases and decreases when inflation rises beyond 10 15 few price decreases are observed and both the frequency and average magnitude are important determinants of inflation i show that a menu cost model with idiosyncratic technology shocks predicts the average frequency and magnitude of price changes well over a range of inflation similar to that experienced by mexico

information rigidities inflation perceptions and the media lessons from the euro cash changeover the objective of theoretical models of information rigidities is to capture the fact that people are constrained in their ability to acquire and process all available information given that most people obtain their information about the economy from the media press coverage of the economy may exert an influence on peoples attitudes this paper tests for this influence by examining consumers inflation perceptions in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover which serves as a natural experiment using a new data set that quantifies the intensity and tone of media reports we document that media reporting has had a statistically significant and economically meaningful impact on inflation perceptions and contributed to their sharp rise in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover and to the divergence between inflation perceptions and actual inflation rates jel e53 d83

growth forecasts belief manipulation and capital markets abstract we analyze how a benevolent privately informed government agency would optimally release information about the economy s growth rate when the agents hold heterogeneous beliefs we model two types of agent conforming and dissenting the former has a prior that is identical to that of the government agency whereas the latter has a prior that differs from that of the government agency we identify both informative and uninformative equilibria informative equilibria are equilibria in which the government agency s equilibrium signal leads to a revision of beliefs we demonstrate that the uninformative equilibria can in fact dominate the informative ones in terms of ex post social welfare

monetary shocks in models with inattentive producers we study models where prices respond slowly to shocks because firms are rationally inattentive producers must pay a cost to observe the determinants of the current profit maximizing price and hence observe them infrequently to generate large real effects of monetary shocks in such a model the time between observations must be long and or highly volatile previous work on rational inattentiveness has allowed for observation intervals that are either constant but long e g caballero 1989 or reis 2006 or volatile but short e g reis s 2006 example where observation costs are negligible but not both in these models the real effects of monetary policy are small for realistic values of the duration between observations we show that non negligible observation costs produce both of these effects intervals between observations are infrequent and volatile this generates large real effects of monetary policy for realistic values of the average time between observations

rationally inattentive seller sales and discrete pricing prices tend to remain constant for a period of time and then jump in the literature this rigidity is usually interpreted to reflect a cost of adjusting prices this article shows that price rigidity can alternatively reflect optimal price setting when there are no adjustment costs namely if the seller is rationally inattentive the model generates non trivial pricing patterns that are consistent with the data and that are hard to explain with the traditional adjustment cost model in particular prices are adjusted frequently but move back and forth between a few given values hazard functions are downward sloping and responses to persistent shocks are sluggish these results are obtained in a model that implements rational inattention without simplifying assumptions on the functional forms of the processed signals

asymmetric information and rational expectations when is it right to be wrong abstract in this paper we examine the effects of private agents being less than fully rational in their expectations we examine this in the context of monetary policy where the central bank may have uncertain preferences either by choice or by necessity the new feature is that we allow the public to react in two different ways they either form rational expectations and internalize the uncertainty about the central bank s preferences in full or alternatively and if this process of internalization is costly it forms a best guess regarding those preferences this implies a certainty equivalence strategy applied to the preference parameters as those parameters enter the decisions non linearly a systematic error emerges we examine the magnitude of the resulting error in inflation and output following the assumption of certainty equivalence under all reasonable levels of uncertainty this error turns out to be small but involves trading a deflation bias against the cost of gathering the information needed for the full information rational expectations solution

sticky information phillips curves european evidence we estimate the sticky information phillips curve model of mankiw and reis 2002 using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major european economies our estimates imply that in ation expectations in france germany and the united kingdom are updated about once a year in italy about once each six months

bounds on elasticities with optimization frictions a synthesis of micro and macro evidence on labor supply how can price elasticities be identified when agents face optimization frictions such as adjustment costs or inattention i derive bounds on structural price elasticities that are a function of the observed effect of a price change on demand the size of the price change and the degree of frictions the degree of frictions is measured by the utility losses agents tolerate to deviate from the frictionless optimum the bounds imply that frictions affect intensive margin elasticities much more than extensive margin elasticities i apply these bounds to the literature on labor supply the utility costs of ignoring the tax changes used to identify intensive margin labor supply elasticities are typically less than 1 of earnings as a result small frictions can explain the differences between micro and macro elasticities extensive and intensive margin elasticities and other disparate findings pooling estimates from existing studies i estimate a hicksian labor supply elasticity of 0 33 on the intensive margin and 0 25 on the extensive margin after accounting for frictions

job security and job search in more than one labor market i introduction a person looking for a new job faces a choice not only of which jobs to accept but where to search for a job in this connection differences in job security across sectors of the economy would appear to be a major concern of many workers however job security has not found a commensurate place in the literature on job search largely due to the single sector orientation of standard search models this paper analyzes the optimal search behavior of unemployed workers who may search in two distinct labor markets or sectors of the economy it is shown that the optimal policy assigns the same reservation wage but different search intensities in each sector the search literature has generally assumed that a worker searches for a job in a single labor market jobs differ from each other once found but while searching all jobs look the same to a worker until an offer is made in this context jobs with higher layoff rates have been shown to induce higher lower or no different reservation wages than similar jobs with lower layoff rates depending upon the specifics of the models which are not compelling examples include burdett and mortensen 1980 hey and mavromaras 1981 ioannides 1981 sargent 1987 and wright 1986 1987 despite our intuitions these studies provide no strong suggestion that a worker will be more likely to become employed in a type of job which offers greater job security all else equal it is otherwise in a multi sector world while the reservation wages associated with the two sectors of the economy are equal despite differences in layoff rates a worker will search more intensively in the sector with a lower layoff rate ii the model the model is simple the worker maximizes his expected wealth in a continuous time stationary environment over an infinite time horizon there are two sectors a and b each is characterized by a permanent layoff rate an offer arrival rate and a wage offer distribution the model generalizes the standard search paradigm and generalizes easily to n sectors accordingly familiar derivations will be omitted they can be found in fallick 1990 an unemployed worker may search for a job in either or both of the sectors simultaneously he pays search costs depending upon how much he searches in total the worker may not search while employed and there is no possibility of being recalled to a previous job the worker may move from unemployment to employment in either sector by receiving and accepting a wage offer from that sector wage offers from sector j j a b are random variables drawn independently from a constant exogenous distribution function f sup j w offers expire immediately if not accepted an employed worker may move from employment in either sector to unemployment by being laid off every job in a sector has the same layoff rate an employed worker never quits it would never be optimal to quit anyway assume that the instantaneous probability of receiving a job offer from sector j is equal to alpha sub j sigma s sub j where alpha sub j the offer arrival rate is the exogenous instantaneous probability that an offer from sector j arrives during the period the term alpha sub j is constant over time the term sigma s sub j is a function of the intensity with which the worker searches in sector j while unemployed normalize the total amount of search intensity available at any one time to unity so that s sub a s sub b is less than or equal to 1 let sigma center dot be an increasing concave function with sigma 0 0 sigma 1 1 sigma prime 0 infinity and sigma prime 1 0 the instantaneous probability of a permanent lay off from a job in sector j is lambda sub j there is a constant marginal cost of searching c assume that job offers and layoffs are generated by constant poisson processes in standard fashion the instantaneous probability of receiving more than one offer simultaneously vanishes

a theory of credibility this paper presents models in which one agent must decide whether to trust another whose motives are uncertain reliability can only be communicated through actions in this context it pays for people to build a reputation based on reliable behaviour someone becomes credible by consistently providing accurate and valuable information or by performing useful services the theory provides a justification for long term arrangements without binding contracts it also describes those situations where it pays an agent to cash in on his reputation many decisions depend on trusting someone consumers must decide whether to believe advertisements banks need to judge the reliability of loan applicants and employers must decide how much responsibility to delegate to their employees this paper attempts to model situations that arise when someone is uncertain about whether to trust the people he deals with in this context reputations for reliability are valuable an agent becomes credible by consistently providing accurate valuable information or by always acting responsibly i analyse a series of simple abstract models of information transmission in the basic model there are two agents the sender s and the receiver r who are to play the game a known finite number of times at each stage both players learn the value of a parameter measuring the importance of that period s play of the game that is the value of making a correct decision and s obtains payoff relevant information s then sends a signal to r who makes a decision that affects the welfare of both players after both players learn the consequences of r s decision the process repeats at each stage r must decide what action to take in order to do that he must assess the credibility of s the difficulty arises because r is uncertain about s s preferences when play begins i model this by assuming that with positive probability s has identical preferences to r s is a friend and with positive probability s has completely opposed preferences to r s is an enemy this uncertainty creates a trade off for enemy senders at each stage providing honest information enhances s s reputation but only at the expense of foregoing an opportunity for immediate gain by duping r the possibility that s is a friend lends credibility to what he says but this credibility may also be exploited by an enemy s the principal equilibrium has the following form in the basic model where s has no control over the importance of a given play s typically conveys accurate information for the first several periods r raises the probability he places on s being friendly after receiving accurate information if he believes that an enemy would have lied to him with positive probability the more important the information the more likely an enemy will attempt to deceive r an enemy will eventually take advantage of r by misleading him when this happens the sender loses all opportunities for deception in the future i

optimal monetary policy and transparency under informational frictions this paper examines the optimal monetary policy and central bank transparency in an economy where firms set prices under informational frictions the economy is subject to two types of shocks determining the efficient output level and firms desired markups to minimize the welfare reducing output gap and price dispersion between firms the central bank controls firms incentives and expectations by using a monetary instrument and disclosing information on the realized shocks this paper shows that an optimal policy comprises the disclosure of a linear combination of the two shocks and the adjustment of monetary instruments contingent on the disclosed information

slow information diffusion and the inertial behavior of durable consumption this paper studies the aggregate dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under slow information diffusion sid due to noisy observations and learning within the permanent income framework we show that sid can significantly improve the model s predictions on the joint behavior of income durable consumption and nondurable consumption at the aggregate level specifically we find that sid can significantly improve the model s predictions for i smoothness in durable and nondurable consumption ii autocorrelation of durable consumption and iii contemporaneous correlation between durable and nondurable consumption furthermore we discuss that incorporating a fixed cost into our sid model does a better job of reproducing the infrequent adjustments of durable consumption at the individual level and the slow adjustments at the aggregate level

a quantitative comparison of sticky price and sticky information models of price setting i estimate sticky price and sticky information models of price setting for the united states via maximum likelihood techniques reaching several conclusions first the sticky price model fits best and captures inflation dynamics as well as reduced form equations once hybrid behavior is allowed second the importance of hybrid behavior in sticky price models is potentially consistent with a role for some information imperfections such as sticky information as a complement to nominal price rigidities finally the favorable results herein for the hybrid sticky price model when evaluated by statistics that summarize the relative fit of different models is consistent with the existing literature that is both supportive and dismissive of such models as this literature has largely ignored fit in evaluating such models many previous studies have focused on ancillary issues such as the standard errors associated with certain parameters or granger causality tests that may not provide much information about sticky price models

finite duration of unemployment insurance reservation wages and participation in the job market abstract this paper extends the theoretical analysis of the effects of unemployment insurance on the decisions of unemployed workers regarding employment and participation in the labour market it uses a job search model that considers jobs with uncertain duration and unemployment benefits that are paid only during a finite number of periods after becoming unemployed separating the incentive and disincentive effects of unemployment insurance the analysis permits us to study the impacts of several changes in the scheme of unemployment insurance on the reservation wages of unemployed workers and on their decisions relative to participation in the job market

rational inattention in uncertain business cycles the paper proposes endogenous information choice as a channel through which uncertainty affects price dynamics i consider a rational inattention model with volatility uncertainty and endogenous information processing capability according to the model firms learning and optimal attention exhibits inertia and asymmetry in response to volatility changes firms choose to process more information when uncertainty rises especially about aggregate conditions and their pricing behavior changes accordingly using a markov switching factor augmented vector autoregression ms favar the paper also documents a significant positive correlation between volatility and firms responsiveness to macro and microlevel shocks consistent with model predictions

international evidence on the efficacy of new keynesian models of inflation persistence in this paper we take an agnostic view of the phillips curve debate and carry out an empirical investigation of the relative and absolute efficacy of calvo sticky price sp sticky information si and sticky price with indexation models spi with emphasis on their ability to mimic inflationary dynamics in particular we look at evidence for a group of 13 oecd countries and we consider three alternative measures of inflationary pressure including the output gap labor share and unemployment we find that the calvo sp and the si models essentially perform no better than a strawman constant inflation model when used to explain inflation persistence indeed virtually all inflationary dynamics end up being captured by the residuals of the estimated versions of these models we find that spi model is preferable because it captures the type of strong inflationary persistence that has in the past characterized the economies of the countries in our sample however two caveats to this conclusion are that improvement in performance is driven mostly by the time series part of the model i e lagged inflation and that the spi model overemphasizes inflationary persistence thus there appears to be room for improvement via either modified versions of the above models or via development of new models that better track inflation persistence

elastic attention risk sharing and international comovements in this paper we examine the effects of elastic information processing capacity or elastic attention proposed in sims 2010 on international consumption and income correlations in a tractable small open economy soe model with exogenous income processes we find that in the presence of capital mobility in financial markets elastic attention due to a fixed information processing cost lowers the international consumption correlations by generating heterogeneous consumption adjustments to income shocks across countries facing different macroeconomic uncertainty in addition we show that elastic attention can improve the model s predictions for the other key moments of the joint dynamics of consumption and income

social mobility and redistributive politics just like economists voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently we model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the generation of income inequality and therefore the magnitude of these incentive costs in the long run left wing dynasties believing less in individual effort and voting for more redistribution coexist with right wing dynasties this allows us to explain why individual mobility experience and not only current income matters for political attiitudes and how persistent differences in perceptions about social mobility can generate persistent differences in redistribution across countries

precommitments for financial self control micro evidence from the 2003 korean credit crisis we analyze high frequency micro panel data on customers of a major korean credit card company before and after the 2003 korean credit crisis and find evidence of pervasive precommitment behavior that is difficult to explain using standard economic theories 1 customers voluntarily reduce their credit card borrowing limits without any compensation 2 customers turn down interest free installment loan offers with high probability and 3 of the small fraction of customers who do accept interest free loan offers most precommit to pay off the loan over a shorter term than the maximum allowed term under the offer

how well does sticky information explain the dynamics of inflation output and real wages abstract this paper finds that a model with sticky information is less successful than a standard model featuring nominal rigidities inflation indexation and habits in generating the dynamics triggered by technology shocks as estimated by a vector autoregression using u s macroeconomic data the real wage responses after a permanent increase in productivity clearly favor the standard model the sticky information model fails to replicate the observed inertial response in the real wage whereas the standard model relies on inflation indexation in wage setting to achieve a better fit the two models are however statistically equivalent after a shock in monetary policy

frictions or mental gaps what s behind the information we don t use and when do we care consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information these losses stem from frictions such as search costs switching costs and rational inattention as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors worldviews or relevant features of a problem not being top of mind most research studying such losses does not empirically distinguish between these mechanisms instead we show that most highly cited papers in this area presume one mechanism underlies consumer choices and assume away other potential explanations or collapse many mechanisms together we discuss the empirical difficulties that arise in distinguishing between different mechanisms and some promising approaches for making progress in doing so we also assess when it is more or less important for researchers to distinguish between these mechanisms approaches that seek to identify true value from demand without specifying mechanisms behind this wedge are most useful when researchers are interested in evaluating allocation policies that strongly steer consumers towards better options with regulation traditional policy instruments and defaults on the other hand understanding the precise mechanisms underlying consumer losses is essential to predicting the impact of mechanism policies aimed primarily at reducing specific frictions or mental gaps without otherwise steering consumers we make the case that papers engaging with these questions empirically should be clear about whether their analyses distinguish between mechanisms behind poorly informed choices and what that implies for the questions they can answer we present examples from several empirical contexts to highlight these distinctions

the effect of unemployment insurance on the riskiness of occupational choice abstract this paper examines the effect of unemployment insurance on the riskiness of occupational choice by postulating a model of job search in which job offers have two characteristics their wage and their security of tenure two versions are considered a general case in which the unemployment benefit is earnings related and a special case in which the benefit is of a flat rate form of particular interest in the paper is the individual s desired trade off between wage and security of tenure and how this trade off is affected by the type of insurance scheme in operation perhaps surprisingly we find that an earnings related scheme encourages risk taking behaviour by the poor and risk avoiding behaviour by the rich in contrast a flat rate scheme neither encourages nor discourages risk taking

choosing between time and state dependence micro evidence on firms price reviewing strategies because of recent findings based on survey data it is now well known that firms differ from each other with respect to their price reviewing strategies while some firms review their prices at fixed intervals of time others prefer to perform price revisions in response to changes in economic conditions some theories have been suggested to explain this however empirical evidence on the relative importance of the factors that determine the different strategies of firms is virtually non existent in this paper we help to fill this gap by investigating the factors that explain why firms follow time dependent state dependent or both time and state dependent price reviewing rules we find that the strategies of firms vary with firm characteristics that have a bearing on the importance of information costs with the variability of the optimal price and with the sensitivity of profits to non optimal prices

consumer search with uncertain product quality this paper presents a unified model of consumer search when both prices and qualities are uncertain it is assumed that price can be observed prior to purchase but that quality can be observed only after purchase and experience this two stage decision problem is of particular interest since in practice there is usually some connection between quality and price of the many interesting implications of this dependence explored in this paper is the result that the usual reservation price rule may no longer be optimal indeed the optimal stopping set may take one of several alternative and more realistic forms

rationalizable strategic behavior the notion of equilibrium proposed by nash 19 has come to play a dominant role in economic applications of noncooperative games while analyses of nash equilibria have unquestionably contributed to our understanding of economic behavior it would be unreasonably optimistic to maintain that nash solved the problem of noncooperative strategic choice there is a small literature beginning with ellsberg 6 and a much larger oral tradition which argues that nash behavior is neither a necessary consequence of rationality nor a reasonable empirical proposition in this paper i take the view that although there may be various reasons why an agent might select a nash strategy the notion of an equilibrium has little intrinsic appeal within a strategic context when an agent reaches a decision in ignorance of the strategies adopted by other players rationality consists of making a choice which is justifiable by an internally consistent system of beliefs rather than one which is optimal post hoc this point of view is not original indeed most serious justifications of the nash hypothesis embrace such an approach arguing that agents will expect the game to yield a nash outcome and consequently will choose their equilibrium strategies nevertheless when we think in terms of maximizing utility subject to expectations rather than realizations it becomes clear that the nash hypothesis far from being a consequence of rationality arises from certain restrictions on agents expectations which may or may not be plausible depending upon the game being played we are then quite naturally led to ask are there any restrictions of individuals expectations and hence choices which are required by rationality alone rather than by subjective plausibility this paper is concerned with defining justifying characterizing and refining a criterion for rational strategic choice which i label rationalizability

the expected price of keeping up with the joneses abstract inflation expectations elicited in surveys have been found to exhibit large dispersion across individuals although several explanations have been proposed none fully explain this puzzle we explore in this paper a new behavioral factor social comparison using original survey data we find that respondents who feel they are falling behind compared to their peers report significantly and substantially higher inflation expectations we argue that this result is consistent with an experience based belief formation model in which those unable to keep up with the joneses overweight the high prices of aspiration goods they are unable to purchase

a quantized approach to rational inattention abstract in this paper i propose a model of rational inattention where the choice variable is a deterministic function of the exogenous variables and still only a finite amount of information is being used this holds provided the choice variable is discrete rather than continuous that is the mapping from the realization of the exogenous variables to the endogenous ones is piece wise constant thus limited information is now a source of lumpiness in behavior rather than a source of noise the approach is applied to a simple static model of price setting where individual price setters face aggregate monetary shocks and idiosyncratic productivity shocks the effect of aggregate money shocks on output and prices is studied it is shown that as the variance of idiosyncratic shocks become large the aggregate log price level converges to a linear function of the aggregate money shock with a coefficient which is strictly between 0 and 1 consequently unanticipated aggregate money shocks have real effects on output in contrast to the sticky price model of caplin and spulber 1987 but these effects are smaller than in standard rational inattention models or in the lucas 1972 misperception model

foundations for optimal inattention abstract this paper models an agent who has a limited capacity to pay attention to information and thus conditions her actions on a coarsening of the available information an optimally inattentive agent chooses both her coarsening and her actions by maximization of an underlying subjective expected utility preference relation net of a cognitive cost of attention the main result axiomatically characterizes the conditional choices of actions by an agent that are necessary and sufficient for her behavior to be seen as if it is the result of optimal inattention observing these choices permits unique identification of the agent s utility index the information to which she pays attention her attention cost and her prior whenever information is costly

rationalizable strategic behavior and the problem of perfection this paper explores the fundamental problem of what can be inferred about the outcome of a noncooperative game from the rationality of the players and from the information they possess the answer is summarized in a solution concept called rationalizability strategy profiles that are rationalizable are not always nash equilibria conversely the information in an extensive form game often allows certain unreasonable nash equilibria to be excluded from the set of rationalizable profiles a stronger form of rationalizability is appropriate if players are known to be not merely rational but also cautious what constitutes rational behavior in a noncooperative strategic situation this paper explores the issue in the context of a wide class of finite noncooperative games in extensive form the traditional answer relies heavily upon the idea of nash equilibrium nash 17 the position developed here however is that as a criterion for judging a profile of strategies to be reasonable choices for players in a game the nash equilibrium property is neither necessary nor sufficient some nash equilibria are intuitively unreasonable and not all reasonable strategy profiles are nash equilibria the fact that a nash equilibrium can be intuitively unattractive is well known the equilibrium may be imperfect introduced into the literature by selten 20 the idea of imperfect equilibria has prompted game theorists to search for a narrower definition of equilibrium while this research some of which will be discussed here has been extremely instructive it remains inconclusive theorists often agree about what should happen in particular games but to capture this intuition in a general solution concept has proved to be very difficult if this paper is successful it should make some progress in that direction the other side of the coin has received less scrutiny can all non nash profiles really be excluded on logical grounds i believe not the standard justifications for considering only nash profiles are circular in nature or make gratuitous assumptions about players decision criteria or beliefs the following discussion of these points is extremely brief due to space constraints more detailed arguments may be found in pearce 18

self confirming equilibrium and the lucas critique we examine the role of off path superstitions in macro economics and show how a false belief about off path play is the key element underlying both the lucas critique and the game theoretic concept of self confirming equilibrium however the impact of false beliefs in these two cases is different in the lucas case a policy maker s incorrect beliefs about off path play can lead to the adoption of mistaken policy innovation however the consequences of such an innovation provide evidence that the belief that motivated them was wrong in contrast play may never escape an undesirable self confirming equilibrium as the action implied by the mistaken belief does not generate data that contradicts it escape from the self confirming equilibrium requires that players do a sufficient amount of experimentation with off path actions

what can survey forecasts tell us about information rigidities a lot we derive common and conflicting predictions from models in which agents face information constraints and then assess their validity using surveys of consumers firms central bankers and professional forecasters we document that mean forecasts fail to completely adjust on impact to shocks leading to statistically and economically significant deviations from the null of full information the dynamics of forecast errors after shocks are consistent with the predictions of models with information rigidities the conditional responses of forecast errors and disagreement among agents can also be used to differentiate between some of the most prominent models of information rigidities

inattentive professional forecasters abstract using the ecb survey of professional forecasters to characterize expectations at the micro level we emphasize two new facts forecasters i fail to systematically update their forecasts and ii disagree even when updating it is moreover found that forecasters have predictable forecast errors these facts are qualitatively supportive of recent models of inattention and suggest a setup where agents imperfectly process information due to both sticky information a la mankiw reis and noisy information a la sims however building and estimating such an expectation model we find that it cannot quantitatively replicate the error and disagreement observed in the data

monetary policy shocks expectations and information rigidities this paper contributes to the literature by assessing expectation effects from monetary policy for g7 economies we rely on expectation data from consensus economics and a panel vector autoregression framework which accounts for international spillovers and time variation we analyze whether monetary policy has changed the degree of information rigidity after the emergence of the subprime crisis and estimate effects of interest rate changes on expectations disagreements and forecast errors we find strong evidence for information rigidities and identify higher forecast errors by professionals after monetary policy shocks our results suggest that the international transmission of monetary policy shocks introduces noisy information and partly increases disagreement among forecasters jel e31 e52

commentary nash equilibrium and mechanism design abstract i argue that the principal theoretical and practical drawbacks of nash equilibrium as a solution concept are far less troublesome in problems of mechanism design than in most other applications of game theory

actively learning by pricing a model of an experimenting seller this article presents a model of a rational seller who is actively learning the slope of his demand curve via his pricing strategy consequently this seller optimally experiments with his price resulting price patterns show a tendency for discreteness as observed in the data which has proved to be a major challenge to most price setting models the experimentation motive can also replicate the observation that prices are more volatile than costs as well as the presence of many idiosyncratic price changes in the data it can do so without a need to assume the existence of large idiosyncratic shocks

social mobility and the demand for redistribution the poum hypothesis this paper examines the often stated idea that the poor do not support high levels of redistribution because of the hope that they or their offspring may make it up the income ladder this prospect of upward mobility poum hypothesis is shown to be fully compatible with rational expectations and fundamentally linked to concavity in the mobility process a steady state majority could even be simultaneously poorer than average in terms of current income and richer than average in terms of expected future incomes a e rst empirical assessment suggests on the other hand that in recent u s data the poum effect is probably dominated by the demand for social insurance in the future everyone will be world famous for e fteen minutes andy warhol 1968

can government purchases stimulate the economy this essay briefly reviews the state of knowledge about the government spending multiplier drawing on theoretical work aggregate empirical estimates from the united states as well as cross locality estimates i assess the likely range of multiplier values for the experiment most relevant to the stimulus package debate a temporary deficit financed increase in government purchases i conclude that the multiplier for this type of spending is probably between 0 8 and 1 5 jel e23 e62 h50

robustly strategic consumption portfolio rules with informational frictions this paper provides a tractable continuous time constant absolute risk aversion gaussian framework to explore how the interactions of fundamental uncertainty model uncertainty due to a preference for robustness and state uncertainty due to information processing constraints rational inattention affect strategic consumption portfolio rules and precautionary savings in the presence of uninsurable labor income specifically after solving the model explicitly i compute and compare the elasticities of strategic asset allocation and precautionary savings to risk aversion robustness and inattention furthermore for plausibly estimated and calibrated model parameters i quantitatively analyze how the interactions of model uncertainty and state uncertainty affect the optimal share invested in the risky asset and show that they can provide a potential explanation for the observed stockholding behavior of households with different education and income levels this paper was accepted by neng wang finance

the effects of professional forecast dissemination on macroeconomic volatility abstract this paper explores the role that professional forecast announcements can have on macroeconomic volatility bounded rational agents are used inside a medium scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model with financial frictions modeled agents must form expectations about endogenous variables by selecting between three simple linear forecasting specifications some of which contain the inclusion of a professionally announced forecast of the economic variable historically calibrated simulations of the model show that the usage of the announced professional forecast by the agents in their adaptive learning forecast specifications can reduce the volatility in consumption inflation and wages by as much as 26 23 and 22 respectively however if the professional forecast is not disseminated well to the agents or biased in its dissemination agents will learn to ignore the announcement and macroeconomic volatility will increase further the inclusion of very noisy professional forecast signals can result in coordinated volatility cascades where agents could reduce macroeconomic volatility by ignoring the professional forecast but choose not to because of its previous forecast performance

self confirming equilibrium rium path of play thus if a self confirming equilibrium occurs repeatedly no player ever observes play that contradicts his beliefs even though beliefs about play at off path information sets need not be correct we characterize the ways in which self confirming equilibria and nash equilibria can differ and provide conditions under which self con firming equilibria correspond to standard solution concepts nash equilibrium and its refinements describe a situation in which i each player s strategy is a best response to his beliefs about the play of his opponents and ii each player s beliefs about the opponents play are exactly correct we propose a new equilibrium concept self confirming equilibrium that weakens condition ii by requiring only that players beliefs are correct along the equilibrium path of play thus each player may have incorrect beliefs about how his opponents would play in contingencies that do not arise when play follows the equilibrium and moreover the beliefs of different players may be wrong in different ways the concept of self confirming equilibrium is motivated by the idea that noncooperative equilibria should be interpreted as the outcome of a learning process in which players revise their beliefs using their observations of previous play suppose that each time the game is played the players observe the actions chosen by their opponents but that players do not observe the actions their opponents would have played at the information sets that were not reached along the path of play then if a self confirming equilibrium occurs repeatedly no player ever observes play that contradicts his beliefs so the equilibrium is self confirming in the weak sense of not being inconsistent with the evidence by analogy with the literature on the bandit problem e g rothschild 1974 one might expect that a non nash self confirming equilibrium can be the outcome of plausible learning processes this point was made by fudenberg and

investment dynamics with information costs investment in physical capital at the micro level is infrequent and large or lumpy the most common explanation for this is that firms face non convex physical adjustment costs the model developed in this paper shows that information costs make investment lumpy at the micro level even in the absence of non convex adjustment costs when collecting and processing information is costly the firm optimally chooses to do it sporadically and to be inactive most of the time this behavior results in infrequent and possibly large capital adjustments the model fits plant level investment rate moments well and it also matches some higher order moments of aggregate investment rates keywords investment dynamics information costs inattentiveness lumpy investment jel classification d21 d83 d92 e22

imperfect credibility and inflation persistence in this paper we formulate a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered nominal contracts in which households and rms use optimal ltering to disentangle persistent and transitory shifts in the monetary policy rule the calibrated model accounts quite well for the dynamics of output and insation during the volcker disinsation and implies a sacri ce ratio very close to the estimated value our approach indicates that insation persistence and substantial costs of disinsation can be generated in an optimizing agent framework without relaxing the assumption of rational expectations or relying on arbitrary modi cations to the aggregate supply relation jel classi cation e31 e32 e52

information theoretic approaches in economics economics has seen a recent rise in interest in information theory as an alternative framework to the conventional notion of equilibrium as a fixed state such as walrasian market clearing general equilibrium the information theoretic approach is predicated on the notion of statistical equilibrium se that takes a distribution over all possible states as an equilibrium and therefore predicts the endogenous fluctuations of the system along with its central tendency simultaneously for this reason se approaches can explain the observed data without relying on arbitrary assumptions about random noise and provide useful insights for many interesting economic problems that conventional methods have not been able to satisfactorily deal with in this paper we review the key elements of information theory focusing on the notions and applications of entropy and se in economics particularly paying attention to how entropy concepts open up a new frontline of economic research

macroeconomic expectations and time varying heterogeneity evidence from individual survey data the goal of this paper is to investigate forecast heterogeneity and time variability in the formation of expectations using disaggregated monthly survey data on macroeconomic indicators provided by

coarse competitive equilibrium and extreme prices we introduce a notion of coarse competitive equilibrium to study agents inability to tailor their consumption to prices our goal is to incorporate limited cognitive ability in particular limited attention memory and complexity into the analysis of competitive equilibrium compared to standard competitive equilibrium our concept yields more extreme prices and when all agents have the same endowment riskier allocations we provide a tractable model suitable for general equilibrium analysis as well as asset pricing

price adjustments in a general model of state dependent pricing we study the distribution of retail price adjustments under the assumption that firms are more likely to adjust their prices when doing so is more valuable our setup nests calvo 1983 at one extreme and a fixed menu cost model at the other all parameterizations are ranked by a measure of state dependence high state dependence implies counterfactually that there are no small price changes and that the variance of price changes falls sharply with trend inflation the parameterization that best fits microdata has low state dependence implying a phillips curve coefficient 60 as large as that of the calvo model but is nonetheless well behaved at high inflation rates

focusing effect and the poverty trap abstract i build a dynamic consumption savings model in which agents choices are distorted by the focusing effect agents overweight the utility of goods in which their options differ more i show that the consumption savings choice depends both on the marginal return on savings and on the total return on savings implying that the incentive to save may increase with the initial level of wealth as a consequence a salience based poverty trap may exist when the marginal return on savings is sufficiently high and sufficiently flat i also consider the case of a perfect credit market and show that a poverty trap may emerge when the salience of consumption is bounded above i discuss policy implications in particular imposing upon an agent a punishment for decreasing savings below a threshold leads to a higher level of savings even when the threshold triggering the punishment is not binding

unemployment benefits and unemployment rates revisited a general equilibrium job search model the impact of unemployment insurance systems on employment behaviour and its subsequent repercussions upon the unemployment rates is the subject of this paper generally unemployment can be viewed as the result of factors which are either external or internal to the labour market the external factors such as the level of aggregate product demand and its impact on the size of the labour market have been the chief concern of many studies of unemployment by contrast the possible impact of the internal structure of the labour market on its own size that is the employment impact of the labour turnover process has been a relatively neglected area of study here we concentrate mainly on the impact of the unemployment insurance system on search behaviour and its subsequent impact on the level of unemployment the type of unemployment we are concerned with is that affected by the duration of unemployed search and the expected duration of the resulting employment contracts rather than the unemployment generated by lack of product demand a common theoretical result in the literature is that higher unemployment insurance payments along with other factors affecting search behaviour may make unemployment less burdensome consequently reducing the incentive of the unemployed to take up employment an observable outcome of such phenomena can be that an increase in the average duration of unemployment spells follows a rise in the unemployment

bounded rationality lifecycle consumption and social security abstract this paper explores an overlapping generations model of bounded rationality in which consumers only foresee the future over a subset of their life span we focus in particular on whether the model can in general equilibrium produce a hump shaped lifecycle consumption profile with a peak that matches data for the average u s consumer for a simple four period model we show that an increasing income profile along with exogenously imposed retirement are sufficient to induce a hump with no other mechanism that can account for a hump besides bounded rationality the model best fits the salient features of consumption data with a planning horizon of 20 years which is well supported by the behavioral evidence found in surveys on retirement planning finally we show that the age of the consumption peak is robust to the introduction of social security mortality risk and another species of bounded rationality quasihyperbolic discounting moreover social security can be welfare improving with a short planning horizon we can calibrate the model to jointly explain the timing of the consumption hump and the optimality of the current social security system with quasihyperbolic discounting instead we can calibrate the model so the current social security system is optimal but we cannot also account for the timing of the consumption hump if we add quasihyperbolic discounting in addition to a short planning horizon the present bias has a negligible effect in equilibrium

optimal central bank transparency should central banks increase their degree of transparency any further we show that there is likely to be an optimal intermediate degree of central bank transparency up to this optimum more transparency is desirable it improves the quality of private sector inflation forecasts but beyond the optimum people might 1 start to attach too much weight to the conditionality of their forecasts and or 2 get confused by the large and increasing amount of information they receive this deteriorates the perceived quality of private sector inflation forecasts as a result inflation is set in a more backward looking manner resulting in higher inflation persistence by using a large scale panel data set on the transparency of central banks we find empirical support for an optimal intermediate degree of transparency at which inflation persistence is minimized our results indicate that while several central banks would benefit from further transparency increases some already have reached the optimal level

when little things mean a lot on the inefficiency of item pricing laws abstract item pricing laws ipls require a price tag on every item sold by a retailer we study ipls and assess their efficiency by quantifying their costs and comparing them to previously documented benefits on the cost side we posit that ipls should lead to higher prices because they increase the costs of pricing and price adjustment we test this prediction using data collected from large supermarket chains in the tri state area of new york new jersey and connecticut we find that ipl store prices are higher by about 20 25 per item on average as a control we use data from stores that use electronic shelf labels and find that their prices fall between ipl and no ipl store prices we compare the costs of ipls to existing measures of the benefits and find that the costs are an order of magnitude higher than the upper bound of the estimated benefits

time variation in term premia international survey based evidence using a large previously unexplored data set of survey based interest rate forecasts that covers a broad range of countries this paper re examines the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates we find that survey based interest rate forecasts outperform not only a random walk forecast but also outperform forecasts from forward rates when using these superior survey based forecasts in a modified expectations hypothesis test the expectations hypothesis is rejected for fewer countries at lower significance levels and has greater explanatory power than when using a traditional forward rates based test we furthermore document strong time variation in the term premia which is an important reason why the traditional expectations hypothesis test is rejected so frequently this time variation seems to arise from the changing attitudes towards risk among market participants and as a compensation for the change in liquidity in the term structure finally we find that generalizing findings from earlier u s studies to other countries may lead to bias in the true economic relationships in these countries

setting the right prices for the wrong reasons we consider a model of nominal price adjustment with firm specific and aggregate shocks to economic fundamentals and incomplete dispersed information firms update their expectations about fundamentals based on their own cash flows revenues and wages we show that in a model with realistic levels of product level price dispersion the firms inference about aggregate shocks is very gradual yet in the aggregate prices adjust rapidly in response to aggregate nominal shocks when an aggregate shock occurs firms mistakenly attribute it to firm specific shocks but adjust prices nevertheless since the exact nature of the shock matters little for its optimal pricing decision

statistical testing of bounded rationality with applications to the newsvendor model abstract in this paper we define bounded rationality in terms of probabilistic cost efficiency this establishes a framework where bounded rationality can be examined rigorously by statistical methods we apply this theory to data from laboratory experiments on the newsvendor model we enter into a theoretical discussion of the classical pull to center effect and explain why underorders are typically larger than overorders

imperfect common knowledge staggered price setting and the effects of monetary policy this paper studies the consequences of a lack of common knowledge in the transmission of monetary policy by integrating the woodford 2003a imperfect common knowledge model with taylor calvo staggered price setting models the average price set by monopolistically competitive firms depends on their higher order expectations about not only the current state of the economy but also about the states in the future periods in which prices are to be fixed this integrated model provides a plausible explanation for the observed effects of monetary policy it shows analytically how price adjustments are delayed and how the response of output to monetary disturbances is amplified

how quickly do forecasters incorporate news evidence from cross country surveys using forecasts from consensus economics inc we provide evidence on the efficiency of real gdp growth forecasts by testing whether forecast revisions are uncorrelated as the forecast data used are multi dimensional 18 countries 24 monthly forecasts for the current and the following year and 16 target years the panel estimation takes into account the complex structure of the variance covariance matrix due to propagation of shocks across countries and economic linkages among them efficiency is rejected for all 18 countries forecast revisions show a high degree of serial correlation we then develop a framework for characterizing the nature of the inefficiency in forecasts for a smaller set of countries the g 7 we estimate a var model on forecast revisions the degree of inefficiency as mananifested in the serial correlation of forecast revisions tends to be smaller in forecasts of the usa than in forecasts for european countries our framework also shows that one of the sources of the inefficiency in a country s forecasts is resistance to utilizing foreign news thus the quality of forecasts for many of these countries can be significantly improved if forecasters pay more attention to news originating from outside their respective countries this is particularly the case for canadian and french forecasts which would gain by paying greater attention than they do to news from the usa and germany respectively

a new suggestion for simplifying the theory of money we propose a new search theoretic model of monetary exchange with indivisible assets based on price posting instead of bargaining and incorporating noisy search this yields some familiar results plus a lot more the model admits multiple steady states due to the self referential nature of liquidity it admits cyclic chaotic and stochastic equilibria and compared to bargaining versions the dynamics are more general and have better microfoundations it generates price dispersion with interesting efficiency implications plus sticky prices and rational inattention parametric examples yield closed form solutions based on these results we suggest this should become a benchmark model in monetary economics

were there regime switches in u s monetary policy working paper 2004 14 june 2004 abstract a multivariate model identifying monetary policy and allowing for simultaneity and regime switching in coefficients and variances is confronted with u s data since 1959 the best fit is with a model that allows time variation in structural disturbance variances only among models that also allow for changes in equation coefficients the best fit is for a model that allows coefficients to change only in the monetary policy rule that model allows switching among three main regimes and one rarely and briefly occurring regime the three main regimes correspond roughly to periods when most observers believe that monetary policy actually differed and the differences in policy behavior are substantively interesting though statistically ill determined the estimates imply monetary targeting was central in the early 80s but was also important sporadically in the 70s the changes in regime were essential neither to the rise in inflation in the 70s nor to its decline in the 80s jel classification e52 e47 c53 key words counterfactuals lucas critique policy rule monetary targeting simultaneity volatility model comparison i the debate over monetary policy change in an influential paper clarida gali and gertler 2000 cgg presented evidence that us monetary policy changed between the 1970 s and the 1980 s indeed that in the 70 s it was drastically worse they found that the policy rule apparently followed in the 70 s was one that when embedded in most stochastic general equilibrium models would imply non uniqueness of the equilibrium and hence vulnerability of the economy to sunspot fluctuations of arbitrarily large size their estimated policy rule for the later period on the other hand eliminated this indeterminacy these results are a possible explanation of the volatile and rising inflation of the 70 s and of its subsequent decline the cgg analysis has two important weaknesses one is that it fails to account for stochastic volatility us macroeconomic variables and particularly the federal funds rate have gone through periods of tranquility and of agitation with forecast error variances varying greatly from period to period ignoring such variation does not lead to inconsistent estimates of model parameters when the forecasting equations themselves are constant but it strongly biases toward a finding of changed parameters tests of the stability of the forecasting equations the other weakness is that the cgg analysis rests on powerful and implausible identifying assumptions they require that we accept that the response of the monetary authority to expected future inflation and output does not depend on the recent history of inflation money growth or output it is hard to understand why this should be so especially in the 70 s when monetarism was a prominent theme in policy debates congress was requiring reports from the fed of projected time paths of monetary aggregates and financial markets were reacting sensitively to weekly money supply numbers the requirement for existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in dynamic models is that the monetary policy rule show a more than unit response of interest rates to the sum of the logs of all nominal variables that appear on the right hand side of the reaction function if we force a particular measure of expected future inflation to proxy for all the nominal variables that actually appear independently in the reaction function we are bound to get distorted conclusions on the one hand because expected future inflation will be a noisy measure of the full set of nominal influences on policy we might get downward bias in our estimates from the usual errorsin variables effect on the other hand to the extent that expected future inflation like most expected future values shows less variation than current nominal variables we could find a mistaken scaling up of coefficients

sticky prices and costly credit we develop a theory of money and credit as competing payment instruments then put it to work in applications agents use cash and credit because the former latter is subject to the inflation tax transaction costs frictions that make the choice of payment method interesting also imply equilibrium price dispersion we derive closed form solutions for money demand and show how to simultaneously account for the price change facts cash credit shares in micro data and money interest correlations in macro data the effects of inflation on welfare price dispersion and markups are discussed as are nonstationary equilibria with dynamics in the price distribution

a tale of two correlations evidence and theory regarding the phase shift between the price level and output abstract we examine the relationship between the price level and output at business cycle frequencies in the postwar period there is evidence of a phase shift between the price level and output such a phase shift is manifested in the price level being countercyclical and the inflation rate being procyclical or acyclical depending on the detrending method used our examination takes three approaches first we apply bootstrapping methods to characterize the two correlations though the methodology could easily be extended to any set of facts second we specify a model economy with forecast heterogeneity showing numerically that this model economy can match the observed pair of correlations third we apply robust control theory deriving conditions in which the price level is countercyclical and the inflation rate is procyclical

an empirical analysis of the revival of fiscal activism in the 2000s an empirical review of the three fiscal stimulus packages of the 2000s shows that they had little if any direct impact on consumption or government purchases households largely saved the transfers and tax rebates the federal government only increased purchases by a small amount state and local governments saved their stimulus grants and shifted spending away from purchases to transfers counterfactual simulations show that the stimulus induced decrease in state and local government purchases was larger than the increase in federal purchases simulations also show that a larger stimulus package with the same design as the 2009 stimulus would not have increased government purchases or consumption by a larger amount these results raise doubts about the efficacy of such packages adding weight to similar assessments reached more than thirty years ago jel e21 e23 e32 e62 h50

the puzzling evolution of the home bias information processing and financial openness abstract this paper explains the home equity bias and its puzzling evolution in a model where investors face an information constraint and have an initial local informational advantage after financial liberalization local investors have a magnified informational advantage since information processed under autarky remains useful after liberalization a gradual shift towards foreign assets occurs as the relevance of autarkic information declines over time in the long run home bias remains large due to the interaction between information and portfolio choices empirical evidence supports the main predictions of our model namely that bias increases with information capacity and decreases with financial openness

financial crisis and persistence evidence from sticky expectations consumption growth model abstractwe estimate the degree of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth for the u s considering the effects of the great recession the behavior of stickiness estimate in the crisis is somewh

full extraction of the surplus in bayesian and dominant strategy auctions we consider auctions for a single indivisible object in the case where the bidders have information about each other which is not available to the seller we show that the seller can use this information to his own benefit and we completely characterize the environ ments in which a well chosen auction gives him the same expected payoff as that obtainable were he able to sell the object with full information about each bidder s willingness to pay we provide this characterization for auctions in which the bidders have dominant strate gies and for those where the relevant equilibrium concept is bayesian nash in both set ups the existence of these auctions hinges on the possibility of constructing lotteries with the correct properties we consider the situation in which an agent the seller possesses one indivisible unit of a good to which he attaches no value but the good has value to a number of potential buyers and its transfer to one of them would increase social welfare in particular the transfer to the buyer with the highest valuation maximizes social welfare in this paper we completely characterize environments in which the seller can design an auction that will enable him to capture for himself the full increase in social welfare induced by the transfer of the good to the bidder with the highest willingness to pay if the seller had full information about the reservation prices of potential buyers his optimal selling strategy would be very simple he would announce a price equal or very close to the highest reservation value the optimal strategy for the bidder with the highest evaluation would be to accept the offer note that we are treating a situation in which the seller can commit himself to a price as a result of the exchange the utility of the seller increases by the full amount of the increase in social welfare and he has been able to fully extract the surplus in many circumstances however a seller has only imperfect knowledge of the buyers willingnesses to pay in this case he must find some mechanism or auction which will enable him to maximize his benefit from the sale of the object the auction literature starts with this observation and shows how the seller can by an astute choice of auction extract the largest possible fraction of the surplus in general the literature has shown that this proportion is strictly less than one in some circumstances the bidders will have information about each other which is not available to the seller for instance in auctions for petroleum drilling rights bidders know the results of geological tests which they have

implications of rational inattention abstract a constraint that actions can depend on observations only through a communication channel with finite shannon capacity is shown to be able to play a role very similar to that of a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control problems the resulting theory looks enough like familiar dynamic rational expectations theories to suggest that it might be useful and practical while the implications for policy are different enough to be interesting

economic science and political influence when policymakers and private agents use models the economists who design the model have an incentive to alter it in order to influence outcomes in a fashion consistent with their own preferences i discuss some consequences of the existence of such ideological bias in particular i analyze the role of measurement infrastructures such as national statistical institutes the extent to which intellectual competition between different schools of thought may lead to polarization of views over some parameters and at the same time to consensus over other parameters and finally how the attempt to preserve influence can lead to degenerative research programs

testing the behavior of rationally inattentive consumers in a residential water market abstract rationally inattentive consumers tend to apply simplified heuristics when making decisions we test the hypothesis of rational inattention in the context of residential water usage where water bills typically account for a small fraction of household expenditures and only attract casual attention we begin by rigorously testing whether or not residential water customers exhibit evidence of rational inattention we then propose a heuristic water demand model to explore the decision making of rationally inattentive consumers and validate the model by comparing the model with the discrete continuous choice model on attentive and fully informed decision makers in out of sample predictions