Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

We design and field an innovative survey of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients that yields new insights about wage stickiness on the layoff margin. Most UI recipients express a willingness to accept wage cuts of 5-10 percent to save their jobs, and one third would accept a 25 percent cut. Yet wo...
Keywords: Wage rigidity, sticky wages, layoffs, unemployment insurance, survey of job losers, worker perceptions
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

An information cascade is a situation in which an agent who observes others chooses the same action irrespective of the value of the agent’s private information signal. Theoretical models have found that cascades result in poor information aggregation, inaccurate decisions, and fragility of mass b...
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

I discuss a new intellectual paradigm, social economics and finance: the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is socia...
Keywords: Social Transmission Bias, Social Economics, Social Finance, Behavioral Economics, Behavioral Finance, Social Networks, Social Learning, Information Percolation, Biased Percolation, Epidemiology, Visibility Bias, Self-Enhancin
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

Biased information about the payoffs received by others can drive innovation, risk-taking, and investment booms. We study this cultural phenomenon using a model based on two premises. The first is a tendency for large successes, and the actions that lead to them, to be more salient to onlookers than...
Keywords: Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Finance, Biased Censorship, Irrational Behavior, Price Equation, Mutation Pressure
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

The thoughts and behaviors of financial market participants depend upon adopted cultural traits, including information signals, beliefs, strategies, and folk economic models. Financial traits compete to survive in the human population, and are modified in the process of being transmitted from one ag...
Keywords: social evolution, cultural evolution, financial markets, social economics, social finance, behavioral economics, behavioral finance, social learning, social influence, social transmission bias
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