Economic Learning, Experiments and the Limits to Information

It is only relatively recently that economists have begun to realise the importance of learning and study the impact it can have on social outcomes. This book provides an in-depth experimental analysis of current models and methods of adaptive learning in economics. It focuses on environments in which there is little information available, thus promoting the use of basic psychological concepts to model behaviour. The author describes in detail and compares, via simulations, a large number of behavioural models, ranging from early psychological concepts to recently proposed rules. He also reports on a number of experiments using novel designs and highly sophisticated cutting-edge statistical techniques for data analysis. A separate chapter exhaustively deals with the use of measures of predictive success and shows how to avoid common pitfalls when comparing different learning models. Significantly, the author is able to identify serious flaws in current modelling techniques which will undoubtedly improve existing experimental methodology and inspire the search for new and better models to accurately measure the learning process.