Managing Self-organization of Expectations through Monetary Policy: a Macro Experiment

We use laboratory experiments to study individual expectations and aggregate macro behavior in a New Keynesian framework. Four different aggregate outcomes arise: convergence to equilibrium, explosive behavior along inflationary or deflationary spirals, persistent or dampened oscillations. A heuristics switching model, driven by relative performance, explains these patterns as emerging properties of the path-dependent self-organization process of heterogeneous expectations leading to coordination on an almost self-fulfilling rule. A more aggressive Taylor rule can manage the self-organization process adding negative feedback to the overall positive feedback system, making coordination on destabilizing trend-following expectations less likely and coordination on stabilizing adaptive expectations more likely.