Information acquisition and learning from prices over the business cycle

Arbeitspapier

We study firms' incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining asymmetric business cycles. When the economy has been in a boom in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with an optimistic belief, the incentive to acquire information is weaker than when the economy has been in a recession and firms share a pessimistic belief. However, the price system, in transmitting information from informed to uninformed firms, moderates asymmetric incentives in information acquisition and renders the aggregate learning outcome approximately acyclical. Our results challenge the prevailing view of procyclical learning as the source of asymmetric business cycles.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance ; No. 740

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Exchange and Production Economies ; Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design ; Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness ; Expectations; Speculations ; Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: Other
• Thema: information choice ; rational expectations ; asymmetric information ; Bayesian learning ; strategic substitutability ; business cycle asymmetries ; Informationsbeschaffung ; Lernprozess ; Gleichgewicht ; Rationale Erwartung ; Asymmetrische Information ; Theorie

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Mäkinen, Taneli ; Ohl, Björn
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Stockholm School of Economics, The Economic Research Institute (EFI)
• (wo): Stockholm
• (wann): 2012

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/56368
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ