On the preservation of deterministic cycles when some agents perceive them to be random fluctuations

Some recent equilibrium models give rise to complex but deterministic fluctuations. We modify the hypothesis of universal perfect foresight by injecting into the economy a nonnegligible fraction of less informed agents who optimize their expected utility with respect to the statistical distribution of prices in the deterministic dynamics. For the standard overlapping generations model with money (the 'Samuelson' case) it is proved that if the fraction of consumers with limited knowledge is sufficiently high, then all equilibrium cycles of period k ≥ 2 disappear. The global properties of the case of 2-cycles are studied in detail. A brief analysis of the 'classical' case is also given.