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This article describes an experiment in a Kydland/Prescott type of environment with cheap talk. Individual evolutionary learning (IEL) acts as a policy maker that makes inflation announcements and decides on actual inflation rates. IEL evolves a set of strategies based on the evaluation of their counterfactual payoffs measured in terms of disutility of inflation and unemployment. Two types of private agents make inflation forecasts. Type 1 agents are automated and they set their forecast equal to the announced inflation rate. Type 2 agents are human subjects who submit their inflation forecast and are rewarded based on their forecast error. The fraction of each type evolves over time based on their performance. Experimental economies result in outcomes that are better than the Nash equilibrium. This article is the first to use an automated policy maker that changes and adapts its rules over time in response to the environment in which human subjects make choices.

Expectations play a crucial role in finance, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and fiscal policy. In the last decade a rapidly increasing number of laboratory experiments have been performed to study individual expectation formation, the interactions of individual forecasting rules, and the aggregate macro behavior they co-create. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive literature survey on laboratory experiments on expectations in macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we discuss the extent to which expectations are rational or may be described by simple forecasting heuristics, at the individual as well as the aggregate level.

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

What role does government play in determining the medium of exchange? Economists weighing in on the issue have typically espoused one of two views. State theorists credit government with the emergence and continued acceptance of commonly accepted media of exchange. In contrast, spontaneous order theorists find little need for government, maintaining that money emerges and continues to circulate as a result of a decentralized market process. History suggests a more subtle theory is required. We provide a generalized theory of the emergence and perpetuation of money, informed by both approaches and consistent with recent theoretical and empirical advances in the literature.

This chapter examines whether the view of the jury in cases involving forensic evidence can be changed from that of “naïve automatons” to that of “sophisticated decision makers”; whether the defense and prosecution must provide the jurors with information to help them develop a schema upon which to evaluate the forensic evidence; and whether to remove decision making from the expert forensic scientist and return it to the jury. The chapter uses secondary sources of information collected from criminal cases, the current federal law, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with expert testimony, studies of how to enable juries confronted with forensic evidence, as well as a framework of learning theory and persuasion games. I argue that expert forensic scientists make errors. Juries are capable of making decisions based on complex forensic evidence if provided the knowledge within which to develop schema to evaluate that evidence. Competition between the defense and prosecution in presenting interpretations of scientifically valid evidence, as well as providing schema to enable the jury to evaluate the information, provides juries with the ability to arrive at a full information decision. Expert nullification of jury decision making should be halted and decision making returned to the jury. The value of this chapter is to integrate learning theory from cognitive psychology with one-shot and extended persuasion games to evaluate the roles of the jury and the expert forensic scientists within the criminal justice system.

We test the determinacy properties of the standard and financial-sector-augmented Taylor rules in a new Keynesian model with a presence of banking activities. We extend the basic fully rational environment to the setting with heterogeneous expectations. We observe that the benefits from extra financial targeting are limited. Financial targeting, if well designed, can compensate for the improper output-gap targeting through the financial-production channel. The analysis demonstrates however possible threats resulting from the misspecification of the augmented rule. A determinate mix of output-gap and inflation weights can turn indeterminate if compensated by too extreme financial targeting. The results are robust to the presence of heterogeneous expectations.

In this article, we survey experiments that are directly related to monetary policy and central banking. We argue that experiments can also be used as a tool for central bankers for bench testing policy measures or rules. We distinguish experiments that analyze the reasons for non-neutrality of monetary policy, experiments in which subjects play the role of central bankers, experiments that analyze the role of central bank communication and its implications, experiments on the optimal implementation of monetary policy, and experiments relevant for monetary policy responses to financial crises. Finally, we mention open issues and raise new avenues for future research.

Companies are starting to capitalize on the potential of experimental economics as a decision-making tool. Hewlett-Packard (HP) is one of such pioneering companies. Experiments, conducted at HP Labs, were used to test retailer contract policies in three areas: return, minimum advertised-price (MAP), and market development funds. The experimental design models the multifaceted contemporary market of consumer computer products. While the model is quite complex, participants were found to be effective decisions-makers and that their behavior is sensitive to variations in policies. Based on the experimental results, HP changed its policies; for example, it made the consequences for minimum advertisement price violations forward-looking as well as backward-looking. This line of research appears promising for complex industrial environments. In addition, methodological issues are discussed in the context of differences between business and academic economics experiments. Finally, the author speculates about potential future business applications.