Expectations, Coordination Failures and Macro Crises

Expectations Traps and Coordination Failures: Selecting among Multiple Discretionary Equilibria

Discretionary policymakers cannot manage private-sector expectations and cannot coordinate the actions of future policymakers. As a consequence, expectations traps and coordination failures can occur and multiple equilibria can arise. To utilize the explanatory power of models with multiple equilibria it is first necessary to understand how an economy arrives to a particular equilibrium. In thi...

Expectations Traps and Coordination Failures with Discretionary Policymaking

Discretionary policymakers cannot manage private-sector expectations and cannot coordinate the actions of future policymakers. As a consequence, expectations traps and coordination failures can occur and multiple equilibria can arise. To utilize the explanatory power of models with multiple equilibria it is first necessary to understand how an economy arrives to a particular equilibrium. In thi...

Coordination Failures

On Coordinating Coordination Failures

This paper examines whether a principal with limited knowledge of agents’ actions can use an income tax scheme to uniquely implement the Pareto optimal equilibrium in a coordination game (i.e. a game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria). We show that, in contrast to games with externalities but a unique equilibrium, implementation in coordination games fails generically unless the identity o...

Equilibria with Coordination Failures

This paper extends the literature on equilibria with coordination failures to arbitrary convex sets of admissible prices. This makes it possible to address coordination failures for cases with price indexation or more general price linkages between commodities. We introduce a new equilibrium concept, called quantity constrained equilibrium (QCE), giving a unified treatment to all cases consider...