Learning from potentially biased statistics

• Autores: Cavallo, Alberto; Cruces, Guillermo Antonio; Perez-Truglia, Ricardo
• Año de publicación: 2016
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: artículo
• Materia: Expectations; Households; Biased statistics; Experiment
• Institución: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a period (2007-15) when the government of Argentina was manipulating official inflation statistics. This period is interesting because attention was being given to inflation information and both official and unofficial statistics were available. Our evidence suggests that, rather than ignoring biased statistics or naively accepting them, households react in a sophisticated way, as predicted by a Bayesian learning model. We also find evidence of an asymmetric reaction to inflation signals, with expectations changing more when the inflation rate rises than when it falls. These results could also be useful for understanding the formation of inflation expectations in less extreme contexts than Argentina, such as the United States and Europe, where experts may agree that statistics are unbiased but households are not.
Fil: Cavallo, Alberto. Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Estados Unidos
Fil: Cruces, Guillermo Antonio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Departamento de Ciencias Económicas. Centro de Estudios Distributivos Laborales y Sociales; Argentina
Fil: Perez-Truglia, Ricardo. Microsoft Research; Estados Unidos