By how much does the presence of behavioral uncertainty in an experimental asset market reduce subjects’ confidence in their price forecasts? An incentivized interval forecast elicitation method is employed to answer this question. Each market consists of six traders, and the value of dividends is known. Two treatments are considered: six human traders (6H), and one human interacting with five computer traders whose behavior is known (1H5C). We find that while the deviation of the initial price forecasts from fundamental value is smaller in the 1H5C treatment than in the 6H treatment, albeit not statistically significantly, the average confidence regarding the forecasts is not. We further analyze the relationships between subjects’ confidence in their forecasts and their trading behavior, as well as their trading performance, in the 6H treatment. While subjects’ high confidence in their short-term forecasts shows a negative correlation with their trading performance, high confidence in their long-term forecasts shows a positive correlation with trading performance.

In the standard economic theory, informed traders have more advantages in economic activities than uninformed ones. In particular, it seems obvious that one can obtain more gains in financial markets by having more information about the fundamental values of an asset. This study examines whether better-informed traders have an advantage over less-informed ones by conducting experimental asset markets following Huber, et al. (2008, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization). Our experiments show that better-informed traders do not necessarily gain more than less-informed ones.

We conducted asset market experiments where one experienced subject interacts with five inexperienced subjects to investigate how experienced subjects change their price forecasts and trading behavior when faced with strategic uncertainty caused by inflows of inexperienced subjects. Only half the experienced subjects initially forecasted prices deviating more from the fundamental values in the market with five inexperienced subjects than in the final round of the experiment in which they had previously participated. Furthermore, the majority of our experienced subjects did not change their trading behavior. Many experienced subjects act as price stabilizers when the inflow of inexperienced subjects is not associated with other changes in market conditions. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Exploiting unique panel data that include direct measurements of resource allocation within households, we investigated the impact of childbirth on intrahousehold allocation for married Japanese couples. Based on a collective model of the household, we developed reduced-form and structural-form estimation equations that allow us to focus on private goods to track the changes in intrahousehold resource allocation. We found one additional child is associated with a reduction in the wife's private expenditure share by at least two percentage points. This may be because she substitutes more say in decisions on the children for her own private expenditure share.

This paper shows that it is possible to track the changes in the distribution of power within a couple by focusing on the changes in the pattern of private consumption when the consumption decisions are efficient and private consumption is separable from public consumption in individual preferences. We first show that the separability of private consumption from public consumption at the individual level carries over to the household level. Hence, changes in public consumption only matters through a change in the residual budget available for private consumption. When the consumption decisions within the household is efficient, private consumption decisions can be modeled as the solution of a problem consisting in maximizing a weighted sum of the private-consumption sub-utility functions of the spouses under the residual budget, the weights being unique and representing the distribution of power over the allocation of private consumption. The model presented in this paper can be used to analyze the changes in the household resource allocation due to, for example, childbirth.

We consider a revision process of personal beliefs with perceived experiences. A player revises his old beliefs on his environment into new ones with the currently stored perceived experiences. A salient point of our theory is to take the personal experiences into belief revision. Both the beliefs and perceived experiences are formulated in the same mathematical manner. In this setting, we consider three kinds of belief changes, e-expansion, e-contraction and e-revision. We prove the Levi identity by these changes considering the perceived experiences, i.e., the e-revision is expressed in terms of the e-expansion and e-contraction. Thus, the revision of a player's personal view is characterized under his experiences.

We consider a simple two-period model of irreversible investment under strategic interactions between two players. In this setup, we show that the quasi-option value may cause some conceptual difficulties. In case of asymmetric information, decentralized investment decisions fail to induce first-best allocations. Therefore a regulator may not be able to exercise the option to delay the decision to develop. We also show that information-induced inefficiency may arise in a game situation and that under certain assumptions inefficiency can be eliminated by sending asymmetric information to the players, even when the regulator faces informational constraints. Our model is potentially applicable to various global environmental problems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper presents a model of learning about a game. Players initially have little knowledge about the game. Through playing the same game repeatedly, each player not only learns which action to choose but also constructs a personal view of the game. The model is studied using a hybrid payoff matrix of the prisoner's dilemma and coordination games. Results of computer simulations show that (1) when all the players are slow at learning the game, they have only a partial understanding of the game, but might enjoy higher payoffs than in cases with full or no understanding of the game; (2) when one player is quick in learning the game, that player obtains a higher payoff than the others. However, all can receive lower payoffs than in the case in which all players are slow learners. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We reconsider the no trade theorem in an exchange economy where the traders have non-partition information from aspect of rough sets. By introducing a new concept, rationality of expectations, we show some versions of the theorem different from previous works, such as Geanakoplos (1989, Came theory without partitions, and applications to speculation and consensus, Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No. 914).

This paper presents a communication protocol to reach consensus. In our setting, every player has asymmetric information and evaluates a fixed event on his information. According to the protocol, the sender sends non-partitional messages that he believes the event with a probability of at least his evaluation. We show that the posteriors for the event must be equal among the players after the communication.

This article investigates epistemic conditions for a sequential equilibrium in an extensive form game with imperfect information: If players mutually know that all players maximize own expected payoffs for any information sets in their final decisions, then their behaviors with belief yield a sequential equilibrium. This result is an extension of [2] in a perfect information game. In this article, we propose the notion of mu-rationality, by which we mean that player knows that he maximizes his own payoff according to the common-belief mu. We also introduce the notion of mu-consistency in imperfect information game. Our main theorem states that mutual knowledge of both mu-rationality and mu-consistency induces a sequential equilibrium outcome in an extensive form game.