implications of economic interdependence for endogenous wage indexation decisions this paper shows how economic interdependence affects the indexation decisions of atomistic wage setters in an environment in which monetary authorities do not observe stochastic disturbances before making their policy choices if stochastic disturbances are common across countries interdependence has no effect on equilibrium indexation choices in identical countries however if disturbances are country specific numerical simulations show that interdependence is likely to reduce equilibrium indexation choices relative to a small open economy we also show that indexation choices may be either strategic complements or strategic substitutes but that strategic complementarity becomes more likely as the degree of interdependence rises

optimal wage indexation in a multisector economy optimal wage indexation is analyzed in an economy subject to common and sector specific supply shocks and aggregate demand shocks where one sector has wage contracts and the other has a walrasian labor market it is shown that it is optimal in this setting to index wages partially to unanticipated economywide inflation and to industry specific profits consequently this study provides possible theoretical explanations for observation of both cpi indexation and profit sharing contracts and for the failure of purely aggregative indexation models to explain disaggregate level behavior copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

customer and retailer rebates under risk aversion abstract in a supply chain setting we analyze a manufacturer s customer and retailer rebates which are sales incentives offered to the end buyers and retailers respectively the performance of both rebates is influenced by the retailer s objective and response to the promotion due to his intermediary position in the channel earlier studies investigating rebates in distribution channels have traditionally assumed that the retailer is risk neutral with the objective of maximizing expected profits in our paper we consider a risk averse retailer we formally model risk aversion by adopting the conditional value at risk cvar decision criterion using a stochastic and effective price dependent demand we analyze the manufacturer s rebate amount decisions and the retailer s joint inventory and pricing decisions in a game theoretical framework we provide several structural properties of the objective functions and show monotonicity of the retailer s decisions in the degree of risk aversion for the case of retailer rebates we characterize the unique equilibrium and for the case of customer rebates we prove the existence of an equilibrium using numerical examples we provide further insights on the impact of risk aversion for example given an exogenous wholesale price we observe a threshold value on the retailer s risk aversion parameter below above which the manufacturer is better off with retailer rebates customer rebates implying that the manufacturer s preferred rebate type can be different depending on whether the retailer is risk neutral or sufficiently risk averse

on the integration of production and financial hedging decisions in global markets we study the integrated operational and financial hedging decisions faced by a global firm who sells to both home and foreign markets production occurs either at a single facility located in one of the markets or at two facilities one in each market the company has to invest in capacity before the selling season starts when the demand in both markets and the currency exchange rate are uncertain the currency exchange rate risk can be hedged by delaying allocation of the capacity to specific markets until both the currency and demand uncertainties are resolved and or by buying financial option contracts on the currency exchange rate when capacity commitment is made a mean variance utility function is used to model the firm s risk aversion in decision making we derive the joint optimal capacity and financial option decision and analyze the impact of the delayed allocation option and the financial options on capacity commitment and the firm s performance we show that the firm s financial hedging strategy ties closely to and can have both quantitative and qualitative impact on the firm s operational strategy the use or lack of use of financial hedges can go beyond affecting the magnitude of capacity levels by altering global supply chain structural choices such as the desired location and number of production facilities to be employed to meet global demand

corporate conservatism and relative compensation this paper demonstrates that in a simple setting with managerial concern for reputation and asymmetric information on ability most managers may refrain from undertaking innovations that stochastically dominate an industry standard common components of uncertainty lead to market inferences of managerial ability based on relative performance managers who undertake the industry standard are consequently evaluated with a more accurate benchmark than those innovating discontinuities in compensation when performance is low because of firings lead managers to have differing valuations of an accurate benchmark depending on type in particular very high and very low ability managers are more likely to undertake superior innovations than those of average ability

optimal inventory and hedging decisions with cvar consideration abstract we consider a newsvendor who makes an ordering decision to meet stochastic demand and buys a put option written on the demand to hedge against the risk of low demand to maximize his expected utility which is measured by the conditional value at risk cvar the put option is fairly priced with specifications for the strike price and the strike quantity with the consideration of lost sale penalty cost we derive structural results on the optimal ordering and hedging polices we show that the newsvendor will not order more than that without the option contract when the strike quantity is pre determined and low and he will order more when the strike quantity is a decision variable moreover the optimal strike quantity is less than or equal to the optimal order quantity in the risk neutral setting and interestingly there are cases in which the optimal hedging ratio first increases then keeps constant as the newsvendor becomes less risk averse we also show that the value of the put option increases as the newsvendor becomes more risk averse and demand becomes more uncertain furthermore the effect of risk aversion on the value of the option highly depends on the magnitudes of the system parameters

option pricing with downward sloping demand curves the case of supply chain options this article investigates the role of option contracts in a supply chain when the demand curve is downward sloping we consider call put options that provide the retailer with the right to reorder return goods at a fixed price we show that the introduction of option contracts causes the wholesale price to increase and the volatility of the retail price to decrease in general options are not zero sum games conditions are derived under which the manufacturer prefers to use options when this happens the retailer is also better off if the uncertainty in the demand curve is low however if the uncertainty is sufficiently high then the introduction of option contracts alters the equilibrium prices in a way that hurts the retailer

delegated portfolio management abstract a problem of screening agents with privately known forecasting abilities and reservation utilities and then eliciting truthful information from these agents once they are employed is considered for the case of risk averse agents and large principals an approximately optimal solution is constructively characterized under the assumption that payoffs are normally distributed a significant extension of the definnetti savage probability elicitation result is developed under this extension knowledge of agent preferences is not required when the underlying conditional distributions are symmetric and this fact is exploited to solve the screening problem in a mean variance formulation

macroeconomic forecasts and microeconomic forecasters in the presence of principal agent problems published macroeconomic forecasts by professional economists may not measure expectations forecasters may use their forecasts in order to manipulate beliefs about their ability i test a cross sectional implication of models of reputation and information revelation i find that as forecasters become older and more established they produce more radical forecasts since these more radical forecasts are in general less accurate ex post forecast accuracy grows significantly worse as forecasters become older and more established these findings are consistent with reputational factors at work in professional macroeconomic forecasts

are some forecasters really better than others in any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables some forecasters will perform better than others however it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters in this paper we present a simple test of the null hypothesis that all forecasters in the us survey of professional forecasters have equal ability we construct a test statistic that reflects both the relative and absolute performance of the forecaster and use bootstrap techniques to compare the empirical results with the equivalents obtained under the null hypothesis of equal forecaster ability results suggest little support for the idea that the best forecasters are actually innately better than others though there is evidence that a relatively small group of forecasters perform very poorly

analyst forecasts and herding behavior the use of analyst forecasts as proxies for investors earnings expectations is commonplace in empirical research an implicit assumption behind their use is that they reflect analysts private information in an unbiased manner as demonstrated here this assumption is not necessarily valid there is shown to be a tendency for analysts to release forecasts closer to prior earnings expectations than is appropriate given their information further analysts exhibit herding behavior whereby they release forecasts similar to those previously announced by other analysts even when this is not justified by their information these results are shown to have interesting empirical implications article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

biased predictors rationality and the evaluation of forecasts abstract optimal rational forecasts are often biased and thus the empirical finding that actual forecasts are biased is not necessarily evidence of irrational behavior using an asymmetric loss function and a regression forecasting problem these points are explicitly demonstrated

channel bargaining with risk averse retailer abstract we first consider a supply chain with one manufacturer and one retailer where there is only one product with stochastic demand the retailer is risk averse with conditional value at risk cvar as her risk measure and the manufacturer is a risk neutral agent we model the problem as a nash bargaining problem where the manufacturer and the retailer negotiate about the wholesale price and order quantity we show that there exists a nash bargaining equilibrium for the wholesale price and order quantity with equal and unequal bargaining power we also find that even for the equal bargaining power between the two agents the retailer s bargaining power for the supply chain profit increases as she becomes more risk averse we then extend the model to the case where demand is endogenous and can be manipulated by setting the retail price we show that there exists a nash bargaining equilibrium for the wholesale price retail price and the order quantity under equal bargaining power

a utility adjusted newsvendor model with stochastic demand abstract we develop a continuous time newsvendor model to determine the optimal inventory level for commodities in an established financial market unlike most models in literature the newsvendor is not necessarily risk neutral and chooses the order quantity that maximises the expected utility of the cash flow at the end of the period the newsvendor exploits the correlation between stochastic demand and the price of the commodities in order to manage risks by investing in a portfolio of financial instruments the decision problem therefore includes not only the determination of the optimal ordering policy but also at the same time the selection of a portfolio that maximises her utility further we demonstrate that our model compared to a myopic approach i e no hedging requires significantly lower levels of inventory buffer to mitigate demand uncertainty thus better utilising capital

the effect of professional advice on the stability of a speculative market the paper is motivated by the apparent inconsistency of situations in which speculators rely heavily on relatively few advisers when theory and evidence indicate that market fluctuations are predominantly random and unpredictable a highly stylized model is used to show how such situations can arise if speculators choose advisers on the basis of observed track records and how block behavior and increased market instability can result it is argued that inferences based on track records may represent a confusion of luck with skill or more formally an inappropriate choice of null hypothesis to be tested other related issues are discussed

analyzing the analysts career concerns and biased earnings forecasts this paper examines the career concerns of security analysts we relate long histories of their earnings forecasts to job separations we find that relatively accurate past forecasts lead to favorable career outcomes such as remaining at or moving up to a high status large prestigious brokerage house controlling for accuracy optimistic forecasts relative to the consensus increase the chances of favorable job separations job separations depend much less on accuracy for analysts who cover stocks that are underwritten by their brokerage houses such analysts are also much more likely to be rewarded for optimistic forecasts than other analysts furthermore job separations were much less sensitive to accuracy and somewhat more sensitive to optimism during the stock market mania of the late 1990s these findings suggest that the well documented analyst forecast optimism bias is likely due to incentives to promote stocks

does competition improve analysts forecast informativeness this paper studies the effect of competition on analysts forecast informativeness analysts compete to achieve a higher rank in forecast accuracy competition can impair improve or have no effec

knowing what others know coordination motives in information acquisition we explore how optimal information choices change the predictions of strategic models when a large number of agents play a game with strategic complementarity information choices exhibit complementarity as well if an agent wants to do what others do they want to know what others know this makes heterogeneous beliefs di cult to sustain and may generate multiple equilibria in models with substitutability agents prefer to difierentiate their information choices we use these theoretical results to examine the role of information choice in recent price setting models and to propose modeling techniques that ensure equilibrium uniqueness

bias in federal reserve inflation forecasts is the federal reserve irrational or just cautious abstract inflation forecasts of the federal reserve seem to have systematically under predicted inflation from the fourth quarter of 1968 until volcker s appointment as chairman and to systematically over predict it afterwards until the second quarter of 1998 furthermore under quadratic loss commercial forecasts seem to have information not contained in those forecasts to investigate the cause of this apparent irrationality this paper recovers the loss function implied by federal reserve s inflation forecasts the results suggest that the cost of having inflation above an implicit time varying target was larger than the cost of having inflation below it for the period since volcker and that the opposite was true for the pre volcker era once these asymmetries are taken into account the federal reserve s inflation forecasts are found to be rational

measuring world business cycles using kalman filtering and dynamic factor analysis the authors decompose aggregate output consumption and investment for the g7 countries into factors that are 1 common across all countries and aggregates 2 common across aggregates within a country and 3 specific to each individual aggregate in quarterly data for the period 1970 through 1993 fluctuations in all aggregates contain world and country specific common components that are both statistically significant and quantitatively important the authors find that the world and country specific common components play different roles in different business cycle episodes for each of the seven countries and that either may be dominant during a particular episode copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

using survey data to test standard propositions regarding exchange rate expectations survey data provide a measure of exchange rate expectations superior to the forward rate in that no risk premium interferes we estimate extrapolative adaptive and regressive models of expectations static or random walk expectations and bandwagon expectations are rejected current appreciation generates the expectation of future depreciation because variables other than the contemporaneous spot rate receive weight in comparing expectations to the process governing the spot rate we find statistically significant bias no variable is as ubiquitous in international financial theory and yet as elusive empirically as investors expectations regarding exchange rates in the past expectations have been modeled in an ad hoc way often by using the forward exchange rate there is however a serious problem with using the forward discount as the measure of the expected change in the exchange rate in that the two may not be equal the gap that may separate the forward discount and expected depreciation is generally interpreted as a risk premium most of the large empirical literature testing the unbiasedness of the forward exchange rate for example has found it necessary either arbitrarily to assume away the existence of the risk premium if the aim

predictability of output growth and inflation a multi horizon survey approach we develop an unobserved components approach to study surveys of forecasts containing multiple forecast horizons under the assumption that forecasters optimally update their beliefs about past current and future state variables as new information arrives we use our model to extract information on the degree of predictability of the state variable and the importance of measurement errors in the observables empirical estimates of the model are obtained using survey forecasts of annual gdp growth and inflation in the united states with forecast horizons ranging from 1 to 24 months and the model is found to closely match the joint realization of forecast errors at different horizons our empirical results suggest that professional forecasters face severe measurement error problems for gdp growth in real time while this is much less of a problem for inflation moreover inflation exhibits greater persistence and thus is predictable at longer horizons than gdp growth and the persistent component of bot

the risk averse and prudent newsboy the effects of risk and risk aversion in the single period inventory newsboy problem are examined comparative static effects of changes in the various price and cost parameters are determined and related to the newsboy s risk aversion the addition of a random background wealth and of an increase in the riskiness of newspaper demand are also examined although many of the comparative effects generally are ambiguous some fairly simple restrictions on preferences and or risk increases are shown to lead to qualitatively deterministic results

rational bias in macroeconomic forecasts do professional forecasters provide their true unbiased estimates or do they behave strategically in our model forecasters have common information confer actively and thus know the true pdf of future outcomes intensive users of economic forecasts monitor forecasters performance closely occasional users are drawn to the forecaster who fared best in the previous period in the resulting nash equilibrium even though economists have identical expectations they make a range of projections that mimics the true probability distribution of the forecast variable those whose wages depend most on publicity produce forecasts that differ most from the consensus empirical evidence supports the model

managerial incentive problems a dynamic perspective the paper studies how a person s concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job in the model the person s productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance there are no explicit output contingent contracts but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability an implicit contract links today s performance to future wages an incentive problem arises from the person s ability and desire to influence the learning process and therefore the wage process by taking unobserved actions that affect today s performance the fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual s concern for human capital returns and the firm s concern for financial returns the two need be only weakly related it is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned it is well understood by now that informational externalities may place special demands on the organization of economic exchange simple price mediated markets will frequently fail in the presence of asymmetric information in that case more elaborate contractual arrangements have to be used as substitutes for the price system lately considerable effort has been devoted to the analysis of contracting under incomplete information with the objective to understand the range of economic institutions that emerge in response to the failure of the price system the analysis of moral hazard has played a prominent role in this development moral hazard problems arise when for some reason or another transacting parties cannot contract contingent on the delivery of the good for instance in buying labour services it may be that the amount of labour supplied is not directly observable precluding a simple exchange of wage for labour as a partial remedy to this problem an imperfect mutually observed signal about the supply of labour can be used as a proxy in the contract frequently output is taken as such a proxy the drawback is that output is often influenced by other factors than labour input which induce undesirable risk into the contract one is therefore faced with a tradeoff between allocating risk associated with incomplete observability and providing incentives for a proper supply of labour gaining insight into this tradeoff is important not only for understanding contracting in the small e g managerial incentive schemes but also because it is closely related to the fundamental tension between equity and efficiency in the society as a whole while our understanding of moral hazard has advanced a lot in past years it is clear that much work remains an important question that has received little attention until

inflation forecast targeting implementing and monitoring inflation targets abstract inflation targeting is shown to imply inflation forecast targeting the central bank s inflation forecast becomes an explicit intermediate target inflation forecast targeting simplifies both implementation and monitoring of monetary policy the weight on output stabilization determines how quickly the inflation forecast is adjusted towards the inflation target money growth or exchange rate targeting is generally inferior than inflation targeting and leads to higher inflation variability commitment to target rules may be better than commitment to instrument rules

the nature of equilibrium in a location model models of location are appropriate in a number of contexts in economics and political science for example firms choose where to position stores and which of a spectrum of goods to produce and politicians select the nature of their platforms in such models it is natural to look for a collection of locations with the property that the location of each individual is optimal given the positions of all other individuals however the pure strategy nash equilibrium provides a solution which is both incomplete and unsatisfactory incomplete because in many cases no such equilibrium exists unsatisfactory because even when it does exist it may not be robust to the specification of the model

technical note a risk averse newsvendor model under the cvar criterion the classical risk neutral newsvendor problem is to decide the order quantity that maximizes the one period expected profit in this note we consider a risk averse newsvendor with stochastic price dependent demand we adopt conditional value at risk cvar a risk measure commonly used in finance as the decision criterion the aim of our study is to investigate the optimal pricing and ordering decisions in such a setting for both additive and multiplicative demand models we provide sufficient conditions for the uniqueness and existence of the optimal policy comparative statics show the monotonicity properties and other characteristics of the optimal pricing and ordering decisions we also compare our results with those of the newsvendor with a risk neutral attitude and a general utility function

the loss averse newsvendor model with backordering abstract in this paper we study the optimal order quantity in the loss averse newsvendor model with backordering we first obtain the optimal order quantity to maximize the expected utility to hedge against the risk arising from the uncertainty of market demand we introduce the conditional value at risk cvar measure and derive the optimal order quantity to maximize the cvar objective about utility it is found that the optimal order quantity with the cvar objective is decreasing in the confidence level and thus is smaller than the optimal order quantity to maximize the expected utility it is proved that under the optimal order quantity with the cvar objective the loss averse newsvendor s expected utility is decreasing in the confidence level it further confirms that high risk implies high return and low risk comes with low return

wage indexation employment and inflation price versus productivity indexing is considered in a model of monetary policy with incomplete information and wage bargaining in a perfectly price indexed economy the inflationary bias due to lack of credibility is eliminated however productivity indexing is more appropriate to dampen macroeconomic fluctuations that are caused by real disturbances we show that productivity indexing alone guarantees both price and employment stability provided the government s reputation is good enough and the union s bargaining power is not too strong this reduces the degree of price indexation as the union becomes weaker and the government s reputation improves productivity indexing is desirable with volatile productivity processes and weak unions jel classification e24 e52

robust inventory decision under distribution uncertainty a cvar based optimization approach abstract we study the robust inventory decision making problem faced by risk averse managers with incomplete demand information in a newsvendor setting three basic models are developed expected profit maximization cvar based profit maximization and a combination of the two each model is robustly formulated under the assumption of ellipsoid discrete distribution and again under the box discrete distribution each robust model can be mathematically transformed into a second order cone program for ellipsoid uncertainty or into a general convex optimization problem for box uncertainty both transformed problems can be optimally solved directly we offer propositions with proof to show the equivalence of the transformed problems with the original ones numerical examples are given to validate the proposed approach we find that the performances under both ellipsoid and box uncertain distributions are robust finally sensitivity analysis with respect to risk averse levels and trade off coefficients is conducted to validate the proposed models and solution approaches

inflation forecasts and monetary policy proposals for inflation targeting as a strategy for monetary policy leave open the important operational question of how to determine whether current policies are consistent with the long run inflation target an interesting possibility is that the central bank might target current private sector forecasts of inflation either those made explicitly by professional forecasters or those implicit in asset prices we address the issue of existence and uniqueness of rational expectations equilibria when the central bank uses private sector forecasts as a guide to policy actions in a dynamic model which incorporates both sluggish price adjustment and shocks to aggregate demand and aggregate supply we show that strict targeting of inflation forecasts is typically inconsistent with the existence of rational expectations equilibrium and that policies approximating strict inflation forecast targeting are likely to have undesirable properties we also show that economies with more general forecast based policy rules are particularly susceptible to indeterminacy of rational expectations equilibria we conclude that although private sector forecasts may contain information useful to the central bank ultimately the monetary authorities must rely on an explicit structural model of the economy to guide their policy decisions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

why are professional forecasters biased agency versus behavioral explanations professional forecasters may not simply aim to minimize expected squared forecast errors in models with repeated forecasts the pattern of forecasts reveals valuable information about the forecasters even before the outcome is realized rational forecasters will compromise between minimizing errors and mimicking prediction patterns typical of able forecasters simple models based on this argument imply that forecasts are biased in the direction of forecasts typical of able forecasters our models of strategic bias are rejected empirically as forecasts are biased in directions typical of forecasters with large mean squared forecast errors this observation is consistent with behavioral explanations of forecast bias

testing for forecast consensus a panel of forecasts may be defined to be in consensus when individual forecasters place identical weights on a common latent variable we suggest this definition and formulate a dynamic latent variable model to test for consensus this method also tests whether it is valid to use the mean forecast as the consensus forecast in applications to surveys of u s macroeconomic forecasters there is greater consensus in forecasts for output growth than for inflation or unemployment but idiosyncratic forecast autocorrelation from year to year is present for most forecasters

risk aversion in inventory management traditional inventory models focus on risk neutral decision makers i e characterizing replenishment strategies that maximize expected total profit or equivalently minimize expected total cost over a planning horizon in this paper we propose a framework for incorporating risk aversion in multiperiod inventory models as well as multiperiod models that coordinate inventory and pricing strategies we show that the structure of the optimal policy for a decision maker with exponential utility functions is almost identical to the structure of the optimal risk neutral inventory and pricing policies these structural results are extended to models in which the decision maker has access to a partially complete financial market and can hedge its operational risk through trading financial securities computational results demonstrate that the optimal policy is relatively insensitive to small changes in the decision maker s level of risk aversion

federal reserve information and the behavior of interest rates this paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public by examining federal reserve and commercial inflation forecasts it demonstrates that the federal reserve has considerable information about inflation beyond what is known to commercial forecasters it also shows that monetary policy actions provide signals of the federal reserve s information and that commercial forecasters modify their forecasts in response to those signals these findings may explain why long term interest rates typically rise in response to shifts to tighter monetary policy jel e52 e43 d82 asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public is a phenomenon that is often posited but rarely tested numerous models of central bank behavior for example show that the existence of asymmetric information has important implications for the effectiveness of policy and the consequences of dynamic inconsistency yet there

optimal ordering quantities for multi products with stochastic demand return cvar model abstract multi product ordering problem with stochastic demand is often optimized by the expected cost reduction or the expected profit improvement in most of previous works moreover risk preference of decision maker is often ignored evidently this approach is impracticable when the corresponding volatility is larger based on the outstanding characteristics of conditional value at risk cvar as a risk measure the paper proposes an optimal order model for multi product with cvar constraints also the model is finally formulated as a linear programming problem the model is simulated for the case of a newsvendor to analyze to what degree it succeeds the solution in fact is bound consistent fully with the decision maker s intuition on return risk decision making finally results of return cvar model and the classical model are compared and shows that return cvar model is more flexible than the classical model

optimal forecasting incentives an agent of unknown expertise is requested to forecast the mean of an uncertain outcome the agent can refine forecasts at a constant marginal cost per unit precision but neither cost nor precision can be verified by the planner the problem is to induce both truthful revelation and an appropriate degree of learning so as to minimize the expected sum of direct planning losses and agent payments optimal contracts are derived with and without self screening of expertise and with and without competition between agents self screening tends to be much less valuable than competition

on the possibility of informative equilibria in futures markets with feedback we study the existence of equilibria and the information content of prices in futures markets where the probability of future payoffs can be altered by an intervening agent who acts in response to the market price hence creating a feedback effect we focus on the market with the simplest possible structure traders betting on the occurrence of a future event by buying or selling arrow debreu securities one dollar claims contingent on a binary outcome we find that in the presence of feedback i a rational expectations equilibrium may not exist ii the market price may decline in response to information that is ex ante more favorable to the occurrence of the underlying event iii an equilibrium that reveals no information may obtain thus feedback from an intervening agent materially alters the way in which price responds to information and potentially undermines the viability of the market itself

monetary policy judgment and near rational exuberance we study how the use of judgement or add factors in macroeconomic forecasting may disturb the set of equilibrium outcomes when agents learn using recursive methods we examine the possibility of a new phenomenon which we call exuberance equilibria i n the new keynesian monetary policy framework inclusion of judgement in forecasts can lead to self fulfilling fluctuations in a subset of the determinacy region we study how policymakers can minimize the risk of exuberance

public information and electoral bias abstract we present a theory of voting that predicts that elections are more likely to be close and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate these findings suggest that providing more information to potential voters about aggregate political preferences e g through pre election polls or expert forecasts may undermine the democratic process our analysis reveals that if the distribution of political preferences is common knowledge then the unique type symmetric equilibrium leads to a stark neutrality result in which each alternative is equally likely to win the election by contrast when citizens are ignorant about the preference distribution the majority is more likely to win the election and expected voter turnout is lower welfare is therefore unambiguously higher when citizens possess less information about the preference distribution

do professional forecasters trust in taylor type rules evidence from the wall street journal poll this article uses the monthly wall street journal poll between 2002 and 2010 to analyse whether professional economic forecasters believe in and thus apply taylor type rules for their own forecasts using their forecasts for the federal funds rate the inflation rate and capacity utilization we estimate whether these are internally consistent with the message of taylor type rules we find that the expectation formation can indeed be described by taylor type rules

luck versus forecast ability determinants of trader performance in futures markets statistical techniques are used to demonstrate that the fortunes of individual futures traders are determined by luck not forecast ability even though a large number of traders appear to exhibit significantly superior forecast ability the investigation strongly supports three conclusions there are fewer participants with significantly superior skill than expected if participants trade randomly there are more traders exhibiting no skill than expected if participants trade randomly and forecast ability is not correlated over time superior forecasters in the early period are only average forecasters in the later period therefore it is luck that determines trader performance copyright 1991 by university of chicago press

stabilization with wage indexation and exchange rate flexibility abstract this survey examines the role of wage indexation and exchange rate policy in dampening fluctuations in output around its target level it is demonstrated that the appropriate choice for wage indexation and exchange rate flexibility is highly sensitive to the nature and the relative importance of the shocks impinging upon the economy as well as to the relevant parameters in the economy moreover the question of the desired flexibility of the exchange rate should be studied in the context of wage indexation and vice versa this interdependence raises the possibility of both policies being complements or substitutes to each other depending on the number of shocks that perturb the economy

disaggregate evidence on price stickiness and implications for macro models i introduction fashions that take hold of the field of macroeconomics share important characteristics with the economy its practitioners seek to understand approaches that are in vogue exhibit cycles with varying frequencies and amplitudes during the 1960s theories based on assumptions of widespread wage and price stickiness dominated the landscape the new classical macroeconomics that emerged in the 1970s challenged the preeminence of these keynesian theories and by the mid 1980s real business cycle theories assuming widespread price flexibility received a considerable portion of macroeconomists attention beginning in the early 1990s as reviewed by gordon 1990 mankiw 1990 and mankiw and romer 1991a 1991b a keynesian counterrevolution occurred and by the conclusion of the 1990s sticky price theories had regained much of their luster today as discussed by woodford 2003 price stickiness is a fundamental building block of numerous theories aimed at explaining both movements in domestic variables such as employment and real output and changes in international variables such as the trade balance and the current account there has as we discuss below been empirical work seeking to determine whether real world data might be consistent with the implications of macroeconomic theories with inflexible product prices there has been very little work however to determine whether the most influential approaches to testing the reasonableness of micro based models of price stickiness support the underlying assumption of widespread price rigidities at the micro level instead leading studies in the literature examine only aggregate data we find this quite surprising given that so many modern macroeconomic models consider economies populated with representative producers that establish an array of product prices that are fixed in the short run which in most models is commonly taken to be the current period of analysis are most product prices really sticky bils and klenow 2004 have addressed this question by studying the frequency of price adjustments for 123 categories of consumer goods and services their answer is that most prices in fact change relatively frequently with about half of prices changing roughly every 4 or 5 too although they found that the prices of certain services and what they call processed physical goods adjust more slowly their overall results offer relatively little support for sticky price models in this paper we also examine microeconomic data for the united states in contrast to bils and klenow however we examine industry level data on firm prices and costs we employ the empirical methodology proposed by the highly influential study by gali and gertler 1999 which in turn is based on the micro based analysis of imperfect competition and price stickiness proposed by calvo 1983 nevertheless our conclusions are broadly similar to those of bils and klenow overall we find that across the industries to which we are able to apply the gali gertler style approach no more than 43 of total sales are generated by industries with estimated periods of price adjustment of 6 quarters or more this percentage drops to below 23 when the discount factor is restricted to reasonable values and under these restrictions industries accounting for at least 36 of all sales in the industries we analyze have estimated price adjustment intervals of less than 2 quarters in all empirical approaches we consider unrestricted analyses producing estimates of industry specific discount factors at least 44 of total sales of the industries we consider are generated by industries with estimated price adjustment speeds of less than 1 yr furthermore in most specifications the unweighted average price adjustment interval for all industries is below 1 yr and the weighted average using industry shares of total sales as weights price adjustment interval for all specifications ranges from no higher than 3

differential interpretation of public signals and trade in speculative markets most models of trade in speculative markets assume that agents interpret public information identically we provide empirical evidence on the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns around public announcements and we argue that the evidence is inconsistent with this assumption we then develop a model of trade around public announcements that incorporates differential interpretations and is consistent with the observed volume return relation then we test the standard model of belief revision underlying most models of trade using stock brokerage research analysts earnings forecasts the hypthesis of identical interpretations seems inconsistent with the forecast revisions in these data

rational expectations and macroeconomic forecasts the article presents extensive results from testing for bias and serially correlated errors in a collection of time series of quarterly multiperiod forecasts for six variables including real gnp growth inflation and unemployment the analysis covers responses by 79 frequent participants in economic outlook surveys conducted regularly since 1968 it shows much greater incidence of apparently systematic errors for inflation than for the other variables also the tests are more favorable to composite group forecasts than to most of the individual forecast sets

a theory of yes men this paper illustrates an incentive for workers to conform to the opinion of their supervisors when firms use subjective performance evaluation this desire to conform arises endogenously from the firm s need to induce the worker to exert effort the author shows that firms may optimally eschew the use of incentive contracts to retain workers incentives for honesty the author illustrates that the incentive to conform implies inefficiencies even when workers are risk neutral and is likely to lead to more centralized decision making than in the absence of the desire to conform copyright 1993 by american economic association

uncertainty and currency crises evidence from survey data this paper studies empirically how uncertainty aects speculation in the foreign ex change markets we use the dispersion of survey forecasts of key macroeconomic variables to measure uncertainty about fundamentals we nd that uncertainty has a non monotone eect on exchange rate pressures namely uncertainty heightens speculative pressures when expected fundamentals are good and eases them when they are bad we prove that this prediction arises from a broad class of currency crisis theories ranging from rst generation to global game models we also show that the proposed empirical strategy remains valid in the presence of forecasters with strategic objectives and use a novel set of instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity bias

loss averse newsvendor model with two ordering opportunities and market information updating abstract a fashion supply chain characterized by a long lead time and a short selling season is considered in this paper facing demand uncertainty the risk averse retailer has two opportunities to make order decisions before the demand is realized the risk aversion is modelled as a penalty to the decision maker the retailer if a target profit is not attained we derive the retailer s optimal ordering decisions and analyze the monotonicity behaviours of the critical market signal the optimal first stage order quantity and the optimal expected payoff with respect to the penalty coefficient we also examine the impact of demand forecast quality on the retailer s decisions and extend the study to the case where order cancellation is allowed

taking the road less traveled by does conversation eradicate pernicious cascades abstract we offer a model in which sequences of individuals often converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads despite communication of the payoff outcomes from past choices this reflects both direct and indirect action based information externalities in contrast with previous cascades literature cascades here are spontaneously dislodged and in general have a probability less than one of lasting forever furthermore the ability of individuals to communicate can reduce average decision accuracy and welfare

differential interpretation of information in inflation forecasts we test the hypothesis associated with a standard assumption in the theoretical literature on learning that economic agents interpret information identically we use a data set based on a survey o

coping with risk management and fill rate in the loss averse newsvendor model abstract in this paper we introduce the cvar conditional value at risk measure to hedge against the risks for the loss averse newsvendor we derive the optimal order quantities for the loss averse newsvendor to maximize the cvar objective of utility with and without the shortage cost respectively it is shown that when shortage cost is not considered an increase in the degree of loss aversion leads to a decrease in the fill rate therefore the newsvendor should strike a balance between the two conflicting targets in selecting the optimal order quantity when the shortage cost is taken into account and sufficiently large it is proved that an increase in the degree of loss aversion leads to an increase in the fill rate to manage both of the two targets the newsvendor should order more items in this case our sensitivity analysis further verifies that high risk implies high return and low risk comes with low return based on the analysis some management insights for the risk management of the loss averse newsvendor are presented

the strategy of professional forecasting we develop and compare two theories of professional forecasters strategic behavior the first theory reputational cheap talk posits that forecasters endeavor to convince the market that they are well informed the market evaluates their forecasting talent on the basis of the forecasts and the realized state if the market expects forecasters to report their posterior expectations honestly then forecasts are shaded toward the prior mean with correct market expectations equilibrium forecasts are imprecise but not shaded the second theory posits that forecasters compete in a forecasting contest with pre specified rules in a winner take all contest equilibrium forecasts are excessively differentiated

testing the rationality of price forecasts new evidence from panel data this paper tests the rationality of individual price forecasts in a panel of professional forecasters here unlike in most previous studies rationality is not rejected the results here differ because 1 using individual forecasts avoids aggregation bias 2 comparison of forecasts to initial data avoids bias due to data revision 3 the professional forecasters have economic incentives to state their expectations accurately and 4 a new covariance matrix estimator consistent when forecast errors are correlated across individuals is used copyright 1990 by american economic association

when managers cover their posteriors making the decisions the market wants to see the stock market has opinions as to what choices firms should make we show that concern for current share prices may lead managers to make these choices rather than those suggested by their own superior information even when arbitrarily many privately informed firms have to make a similar decision the market s prejudices may still prevail we compare the distortions that arise from share price maximization with those due to herd behavior among profit maximizing firms and show that the former results in strictly less efficient use of information

impact of risk aversion on optimal decisions in supply contracts abstract we introduce the concept of conditional value at risk as the evaluation criterion in a supply contract model we first derive the manufacturer s optimal decisions and then analyze the impact of risk aversion on the manufacturer s decisions we follow by conducting numerical experiments to observe how the manufacturer s risk attitude affects his decisions we obtain results that characterize the explicit relationship between the manufacturer s risk attitude and his optimal decisions we also show the dependence of the decision variables on the price and cost parameters which is seldom given in the literature

the impact of customer returns and bidirectional option contract on refund price and order decisions abstract this study investigates the impacts of customer returns and a bidirectional option contract on a newsvendor firm s refund price and order decisions the stochastic demand is refund price sensitive we show that the optimal refund price increases with the option price and decreases with both the wholesale and exercise prices while the optimal order quantity increases with the exercise price but decreases with both the wholesale and option prices furthermore we illustrate that in the presence of customer returns the optimal refund price and order quantity decrease the firm should cut the refund price and order more products if a bidirectional option contract is available we identify the conditions under which a firm should offer a full partial or no refund policy we also show that a bidirectional option contract can reduce the negative impact of customer returns and enhance the firm s profit especially under high demand uncertainty

career concerns of mutual fund managers we examine the labor market for mutual fund managers using data from 1992 1994 we find that termination is more performance sensitive for younger managers we identify possible implicit incentives created by the termination performance relationship the shape of the termination performance relationship may give younger managers an incentive to avoid unsystematic risk direct effects of portfolio composition may also give younger managers an incentive to herd into popular sectors consistent with these incentives we find that younger managers hold less unsystematic risk and have more conventional portfolios promotion incentives and market responses to managerial turnover are also studied

has greater competition restrained u s inflation this paper shows how increased goods market competition affects the behavior of inflation in a multisector economy by raising the price elasticity of demand increased goods market competition theoretically lowers inflation and makes the aggregate price level less sensitive to aggregate demand shocks we find that proxies for the aggregate degree of goods market competition are statistically and economically significant in short run phillips curve models of core inflation evidence indicates that heightened goods market competition has flattened the slope of the short run expectations augmented phillips curve and slightly lowered the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu

a value based approach to option pricing the case of supply chain options chapter 6 explores the pricing issue for supply chain options in classical research this issue is generally considered in the stackelberg game framework such a pricing scheme however is usually unacceptable to the follower since the leader always captures all the surplus derived from the options being different from the existing literature this chapter develops a value based pricing scheme for supply chain options with two modeling scenarios including a single retailer and multiple retailers the intuition behind such a pricing scheme is to price the option based on the value inherent in the option right as shown in the research such a pricing scheme can assure that each of the contracting partners captures a share of the surplus derived from the options as a result the pricing schemes developed in this chapter are more objective and fair and consequently are more likely to be accepted by the contracting partners as compared with those that follow the stackelberg game approach

strategic disclosure of meaningful information to rival i study a model of strategic disclosure of a private signal to a rival in the presence of a payoff externality in the model two agents forecast the unknown true state of a future period specifically the quality of the signal is also private information hence which quality of signal is revealed for which incentive is the main question of interest i show that even when disclosure is costly the revealing equilibrium where an agent voluntarily reveals his signal can exist and it should be a monotone equilibrium asymmetry between the penalty for an incorrect forecast and the reward for a correct forecast is a necessary condition for the existence of this revealing equilibrium if the penalty is larger than the reward the unique revealing equilibrium is a separating equilibrium where only the low quality signal is disclosed in order to induce the rival s imitation on the other hand if the reward is much larger than the penalty the unique revealing equilibrium is a pooling equilibrium where the signal is always revealed in order to induce the rival s deviation if the reward is not much larger than the penalty no revealing equilibrium is robust to a costly disclosure jel d81 d82

conflict of interest and the credibility of underwriter analyst recommendations brokerage analysts frequently comment on and sometimes recommend companies that their firms have recently taken public we show that stocks that underwriter analysts recommend perform more poorly than buy recommendations by unaffiliated brokers prior to at the time of and subsequent to the recommendation date we conclude that the recommendations by underwriter analysts show significant evidence of bias we show also that the market does not recognize the full extent of this bias the results suggest a potential conflict of interest inherent in the different functions that investment bankers perform

herding among security analysts the paper shows that the buy or sell recommendations of security analysts have a signi cant positive in uence on the recommendations of the next two analysts this in uence can be traced to short lived information in the most recent revisions in contrast the in uence of the prevailing consensus is not stronger if the consensus accurately forecasts subsequent stock price movements this indicates consensus herding consistent with models in which analysts herd based on little information the consensus also has a stronger in uence when market conditions are favorable the resulting poorer information aggregation could cause bull markets to be intrinsically more fragilea e g bikhchandani et al j political economy 100 5 1992 992 1026 2000 elsevier science s a all rights reserved jel classixcation g11 g14 g24

who forecasts better this article suggests that the emphasis on forecast evaluations should be redirected from searching for best forecasters to finding those who are better a new methodology is developed and the results indicate that it is possible to identify better forecasters

consensus and uncertainty in economic prediction we define consensus as the degree of agreement among point predictions aimed at the same target by different individuals and uncertainty as the diffuseness of the corresponding probability distributions this distinction is made operational with the aid of the nber asa survey data on matched point and probabilistic forecasts of inflation and the rate of change in gross national product the means of the two sets of forecasts agree closely standard deviations of point forecasts tend to understate uncertainty as measured by standard deviations of the predictive probability distributions however these measures of consensus and uncertainty are on the whole positively correlated there is evidence that expectations of higher inflation generate greater uncertainty about inflation tests also favor the hypothesis that a rise in inflation uncertainty has adverse effects on real growth

decision bias in the newsvendor problem with a known demand distribution experimental evidence in the newsvendor problem a decision maker orders inventory before a one period selling season with stochastic demand if too much is ordered stock is left over at the end of the period whereas if too little is ordered sales are lost the expected profit maximizing order quantity is well known but little is known about how managers actually make these decisions we describe two experiments that investigate newsvendor decisions across different profit conditions results from these studies demonstrate that choices systematically deviate from those that maximize expected profit subjects order too few of high profit products and too many of low profit products these results are not consistent with risk aversion risk seeking preferences prospect theory preferences waste aversion stockout aversion or the consequences of underestimating opportunity costs two explanations are consistent with the data one subjects behave as if their utility function incorporates a preference to reduce ex post inventory error the absolute difference between the chosen quantity and realized demand two subjects suffer from the anchoring and insufficient adjustment bias feedback and training did not mitigate inventory order errors we suggest techniques to improve decision making

security analysts career concerns and herding of earnings forecasts several theories of reputation and herding see e g scharfstein and stein 1990 suggest that herding among agents should vary with career concerns our goal in this paper is to document whether such a link exists in the labor market for security analysts specifically we look at the relationship between an analyst s job tenure a proxy for career concerns and various measures of stock earnings forecast performance we establish the following key results 1 older analysts are more likely to produce earnings forecasts of firms before younger ones 2 their forecasts also deviate more from the consensus forecast than their younger counterparts we argue that these results are consistent with some reputational models of herding we also establish a number of auxiliary findings regarding the relationship between forecast accuracy and frequency of forecast revisions with job tenure

blue chip rationality tests this paper tests the rationality of forecasts made by individuals who contribute to the blue chip consensus forecasting service and tries by means of a questionnaire on forecasting methods to establish why some forecasters appear more rational than others tests based on consensus forecasts prove unreliable as guides to the number of individuals who produce rational forecasts individual forecasts are more likely to be rational if they are based on a mainstream economic theory and incorporate a substantial element of judgment copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

lies damn lies and pre election polling in this paper we ask the question how well do pre election polls forecast the actual results of elections in the united states 1 the question is interesting for a number of reasons first even polling data suggest about one third of polling respondents do not believe that polls work in the best interests of the general public 2 the situa tion is such that even many national governments have undertaken to restrict some aspect of pre election polling a 1997 international survey of governments found 30 of 78 surveyed nations had some kind of ban on publication of poll results second there is a strong presumption in the lit erature on professional forecasting in other con texts such as interest rate forecasting which do not rely on sampling per se that forecasts will be biased there is a variety of explanations for why forecasts will be biased one honest motivation is that pollsters may avoid reporting results from the unavoidable atypical polls third in the literature in economics it is sometimes assumed

herd behavior and investment comment in an influential paper david s scharfstein and jeremy c stein 1990 modeled sequential investment by agents concerned about their reputation as good forecasters consider an agent who acts after observing the behavior of another ex ante identical agent scharfstein and stein argue that reputational herding requires that better agents have more correlated signals conditionally on the state of the world they claim that without correlation the second agent would have no incentive to attempt to manipulate the market inference about ability by imitating the behavior of the first agent in this note we show that in their model correlation is not necessary for herding other than in degenerate cases our clarification exploits a parallel with statistical herding introduced by abhijit v banerjee 1992 and sushil bikhchandani et al 1992 henceforth bhw bhw feature investors who maximize expected profits in a common value environment and have access to conditionally independent private signals of bounded precision while still observing the behavior of others eventually the evidence accumulated from observing earlier decisions is sufficiently strong to swamp the private information of a single decision maker thereafter everyone rationally copies the prevailing behavior we notice that payoffs have a common value nature in both the statistical and the reputational model the observed behavior of other agents possibly affects the probability belief attached to different states of the world as well as the payoff conditional on each state herding arises from the interaction of these two channels affecting the expected payoff be it physical or reputational positive differential conditional correlation of signals in the reputational model is tantamount to the introduction of positive payoff externalities in the statistical model this reinforces the tendency to herd already present with independence the fact that differential conditional correlation is not needed for herding is a clear strength of the reputational herding model it is not necessary to assume common unpredictable components of returns at the individual level in order to rationalize the empirical findings that individual prediction errors of security analysts are correlated after setting up scharfstein and stein s model in section i we summarize their findings in section ii and provide a unified definition of herd behavior in section iii section iv contains our critique of their line of argument and clarifies the role of differential conditional correlation in section v we propose alternative robust scenarios where herding would indeed be driven by correlation section vi concludes