Students' persistent preconceptions and learning economic principles

Economic views held by the general public tend to differ significantly from those of economic experts. Would these differences fade away if people were exposed to some economic instruction? In this article, the authors identify college students' preconceptions about economic issues at the beginning of the semester, verify their persistence throughout the semester, and test whether their beliefs are correlated to course performance. The authors conduct a survey at the beginning and end of the semester on a sample of first-year students taking an economic principles course. They find evidence of preconception persistence and reasoning inconsistencies, pointing to some cognitive biases as a plausible cause. Most students do not integrate the newly learned tools into their thinking process, even if they perform well in tests.     

Beliefs and rationalizability in games with complementarities

We propose two characteristics of beliefs and study their role in shaping the set of rationalizable strategy profiles in games with incomplete information. The first characteristic, type-sensitivity, is related to how informative a player thinks his type is. The second characteristic, optimism, is related to how “favorable” a player expects the outcome of the game to be. The paper has two main results: the first result provides an upper bound on the size of the set of rationalizable strategy profiles; the second gives a lower bound on the change of location of this set. These bounds are explicit expressions that involve type-sensitivity, optimism, and payoff characteristics. Our results generalize and clarify the well-known uniqueness result of global games (Carlsson and van Damme, 1993). They also imply new uniqueness results and allow us to study rationalizability in new environments. We provide applications to supermodular mechanism design (Mathevet, 2010b) and information processing errors.     

Corruption perceptions vs. corruption reality

This paper examines the accuracy of corruption perceptions by comparing Indonesian villagers' reported perceptions about corruption in a road-building project in their village with a more objective measure of ‘missing expenditures’ in the project. I find that villagers' reported perceptions do contain real information, and that villagers are sophisticated enough to distinguish between corruption in a particular road project and general corruption in the village. The magnitude of the reported information, however, is small, in part because officials hide corruption where it is hardest for villagers to detect. I also find that there are biases in reported perceptions. The findings illustrate the limitations of relying solely on corruption perceptions, whether in designing anti-corruption policies or in conducting empirical research on corruption.     

Predicting Hunting Intentions and Behavior: An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior

Using a mail survey ( n = 395) of outdoor recreationists, the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) was applied to the prediction and explanation of hunting. In a series of hierarchical regression analyses, it was found that hunting intentions, but not perceptions of behavioral control, contributed to the prediction of self-reported hunting frequency. Hunting intentions, in turn, were strongly influenced by attitudes, subjective norms, and perceptions of behavioral control, and these predictors correlated highly with theoretically derived sets of underlying beliefs. Broad values related to wildlife and to life in general correlated weakly with hunting behavior, and their effects were largely mediated by the components of the theory of planned behavior.     

资产价格泡沫研究述评:实验金融学视角

本文从实验金融学的视角介绍了资产泡沫最新的定义和分类,阐述了投机性泡沫、理性泡沫与非理性泡沫之间的区别和联系,着重从信息对称、信息不对称、有限套利泡沫、异质信念和实验金融五个方面系统评述了资产价格泡沫理论的发展历程和新进展,指出该领域进一步的研究方向和中国开展资产价格泡沫研究的重要意义。研究表明,随着现代金融学的高速发展,学界对资产泡沫的研究日益深入。特别是非理性和实验金融学视角的引入,突破了传统金融框架的束缚,为这一课题研究带来了新的认知和理解。即便如此,目前仍无法根除资产泡沫产生的可能性。很多相关问题,如资产泡沫产生的时间和根本原因,仍然等待着学者们去探索和研究。     

异质信念对股价波动的非对称性影响研究

本文利用上市公司的相关数据,实证研究了异质信念对我国股票市场股价波动的 影响,探讨了在不同的市场行情和企业性质下异质信念对股价波动的非对称性影响,并对融资 融券推出前后异质信念对股价波动的非对称性影响进行了研究。研究结果表明：（1）股票投 资者异质信念的差异程度越大,股价偏离其股票的内在价值就越大,进而导致股价的波动程度 更剧烈;（2）异质信念对股价波动的影响呈非对称性,在熊市行情下异质信念对股价波动的 影响要高于牛市,在国有企业背景下异质信念对股价的波动程度大于非国有企业;（3）融资 融券推出后在一定程度上可以减缓异质信念对股价波动的影响。     

投资者异质信念下的信用债违约风险量化研究——基于我国信用债市场的应用

信用债违约不完全依赖于企业资产负债结构,投资者无从得知企业兑付意愿,且我国市场信息披露与违约追偿机制尚不完全,市场价格与外部评级反应延迟,投资者信息认知不同,因此对违约判断存在异质信念。针对提出了适用于我国市场的信用债违约风险模型,将Giesecke（2006）中关于企业违约阈值预期的均匀分布假设拓展到一般的Beta分布,通过Beta分布的方差刻画投资者异质信念的强度,并给出条件违约概率和信用价差的一般解析表达式。数值分析指出,投资者异质信念对短中期信用债影响较大,异质信念越高,信用利差越大;在接近违约时,异质信念会造成违约风险预期的低估。通过我国市场真实信用案例的实证检验,模型可以较早预警信用事件,且精度优于已有信用风险量化模型。     

False claims in politics: Evidence from the US

In this paper, we use data on 2459 public claims made by 444 politicians from the leading US fact-checking site (PolitiFact) to provide an empirical analysis of false claims in politics, shedding light on their characteristics within an advanced democracy. The frequency of falsehoods differs according to party affiliation and topic, with false claims more likely on such topics as elections, health, labor, taxes and values. For Republican politicians, falsehood pays off in the short run, as it is associated with greater political support.     

The α-beauty contest: Choosing numbers, thinking intervals

We present a model for the α-beauty contest that explains common patterns in experimental data of one-shot and iterative games. The approach is based on two basic assumptions. First, players iteratively update their recent guesses. Second, players estimate intervals rather than exact numbers to cope with incomplete knowledge of other players' rationality. Under these assumptions we extend the cognitive hierarchy model of Camerer et al. [Camerer, C., Ho, T., Chong, J., 2003b. A cognitive hierarchy model of one-shot games. Quart. J. Econ. 119, 861–898]. The extended model is estimated on experimental data from a newspaper experiment.