Do You Know that I Know that You Know…? Higher-Order Beliefs in Survey Data*

S-Tier
Journal: Quarterly Journal of Economics
Year: 2021
Volume: 136
Issue: 3
Pages: 1387-1446

Score contribution per author:

2.011 = (α=2.01 / 4 authors) × 4.0x S-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

We implement a new survey of firms, focusing on their higher-order macroeconomic expectations. The survey provides a novel set of stylized facts regarding the relationship between first-order and higher-order expectations of economic agents, including how they adjust their beliefs in response to a variety of information treatments. We show how these facts can be used to calibrate key parameters of noisy-information models with infinite regress as well as to test predictions made by this class of models. We also consider a range of extensions to the basic noisy-information model that can potentially better reconcile theory and empirics. Although some extensions like level-k thinking are unsuccessful, incorporating heterogeneous long-run priors can address the empirical shortcomings of the basic noisy-information model.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:oup:qjecon:v:136:y:2021:i:3:p:1387-1446.
Journal Field
General
Author Count
4
Added to Database
2026-01-25