'Rational Agents: Irrational Markets'

Roger Farmer:

Rational Agents: Irrational Markets: Bob Shiller wrote an interesting piece in today's NY Times on the irrationality of human action. Shiller argues that the economist's conception of human beings as rational is hard to square with the behavior of asset markets.

Although I agree with Shiller, that human action is inadequately captured by the assumptions that most economists make about behavior, I am not convinced that we need to go much beyond the rationality assumption, to understand what causes financial crises or why they are so devastatingly painful for large numbers of people. The assumption that agents maximize utility can get us a very very long way. ...

In my own work, I have shown that the labor market can go very badly wrong even when everybody is rational.  My coauthors and I showed in a recent paper, that the same idea holds in financial markets. Even when individuals are assumed to be rational; the financial markets may function very badly. ...

Miles Kimball and I have both been arguing that stock market fluctuations are inefficient and we both think that government should act to stabilize the asset markets. Miles' position is much closer to that of Bob Shiller; he thinks that agents are not always rational in the sense of Edgeworth. Miles and Bob may well be right. But in my view, the argument for stabilizing asset markets is much stronger. Even if we accept that agents are rational, it does not follow that swings in asset prices are Pareto efficient. But whether the motive arises from irrational people, or irrational markets; Miles and I agree: We can, and should, design an institution that takes advantage of the government's ability to trade on behalf of the unborn. More on that in a future post. ...