IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/manchs/v76y2008i3p279-300.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

‘You Might As Well Be Hung For A Sheep As A Lamb’: The Loss Function Of An Agent

Author

Listed:
  • MARGARET BRAY
  • CHARLES GOODHART

Abstract

Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents. The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them. Agents thus have loss functions which are bounded above. We work with a bell loss function which has this property. With additive uncertainty the certainty equivalence which holds for a quadratic loss function breaks down with a bell loss function when there are two or more targets. With multiplicative (Brainard) uncertainty policy is more conservative than in the absence of multiplicative uncertainty, but less so with the bell than the quadratic loss function.

Suggested Citation

  • Margaret Bray & Charles Goodhart, 2008. "‘You Might As Well Be Hung For A Sheep As A Lamb’: The Loss Function Of An Agent," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 76(3), pages 279-300, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:manchs:v:76:y:2008:i:3:p:279-300
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9957.2008.01060.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9957.2008.01060.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1467-9957.2008.01060.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jagjit Chadha & Philip Schellekens, 1998. "Utility Functions For Central Bankers: The Not So Drastic Quadratic," FMG Discussion Papers dp308, Financial Markets Group.
    2. CHADHA, Jagjit & SCHELLEKENS, Philip, "undated". "Monetary policy loss functions: two cheers for the quadratic," Working Papers 1999002, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    3. Suleyman Basak & Alex Shapiro & Lucie Teplá, 2006. "Risk Management with Benchmarking," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(4), pages 542-557, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Ferreira & David Kershaw & Tom Kirchmaier & Edmund Schuster, "undated". "Shareholder Empowerment and Bank Bailouts," FMG Discussion Papers dp714, Financial Markets Group.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Weitzman Nagar, 2007. "Asymmetry in Monetary Policy: An Asymmetric Objective Function and a New-Keynesian Model," Bank of Israel Working Papers 2007.02, Bank of Israel.
    2. Graham Elliott & Ivana Komunjer & Allan Timmermann, 2008. "Biases in Macroeconomic Forecasts: Irrationality or Asymmetric Loss?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(1), pages 122-157, March.
    3. Chendi Ni & Yuying Li & Peter A. Forsyth, 2023. "Neural Network Approach to Portfolio Optimization with Leverage Constraints:a Case Study on High Inflation Investment," Papers 2304.05297, arXiv.org, revised May 2023.
    4. Leoni, Patrick L., 2009. "Downside risk of derivative portfolios with mean-reverting underlyings," Discussion Papers on Economics 2/2009, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics.
    5. Ali Al‐Nowaihi & Livio Stracca, 2003. "Behavioural Central Bank Loss Functions, Skewed Risks and Certainty Equivalence," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 71(s1), pages 21-38, September.
    6. Guan, Guohui & Liang, Zongxia, 2016. "Optimal management of DC pension plan under loss aversion and Value-at-Risk constraints," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 224-237.
    7. Suleyman Basak & Anna Pavlova & Alexander Shapiro, 2007. "Optimal Asset Allocation and Risk Shifting in Money Management," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(5), pages 1583-1621, 2007 21.
    8. Corrado, Luisa & Holly, Sean, 2003. "Nonlinear Phillips curves, mixing feedback rules and the distribution of inflation and output," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 467-492, December.
    9. Kraft, Holger & Steffensen, Mogens, 2012. "A dynamic programming approach to constrained portfolios," CFS Working Paper Series 2012/07, Center for Financial Studies (CFS).
    10. Juan-Pedro Gomez & Fernando Zapatero, 2003. "Asset pricing implications of benchmarking: a two-factor CAPM," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(4), pages 343-357.
    11. Martijn Boermans & Ian Cooper & Piet Sercu & Rosanne Vanpée, 2022. "Foreign bias in equity portfolios: Informational advantage or familiarity bias?," Working Papers 742, DNB.
    12. Virginie Boinet & Christopher Martin, 2008. "Targets, zones, and asymmetries: a flexible nonlinear model of recent UK monetary policy," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 60(3), pages 423-439, July.
    13. Martin Skitmore & Franco K. T. Cheung, 2007. "Explorations in specifying construction price forecast loss functions," Construction Management and Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(5), pages 449-465.
    14. Özer Karagedikli & Kirdan Lees, 2004. "Do inflation targeting central banks behave asymmetrically? Evidence from Australia and New Zealand," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Discussion Paper Series DP 2004/02, Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
    15. Zongxia Liang & Yang Liu & Litian Zhang, 2025. "A framework of state-dependent utility optimisation with general benchmarks," Finance and Stochastics, Springer, vol. 29(2), pages 469-518, April.
    16. Paolo Surico, 2008. "Measuring the Time Inconsistency of US Monetary Policy," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 75(297), pages 22-38, February.
    17. Pierre-Richard Agénor, 2002. "Monetary Policy under Flexible Exchange Rates: An Introduction to Inflation Targeting," Central Banking, Analysis, and Economic Policies Book Series, in: Norman Loayza & Raimundo Soto & Norman Loayza (Series Editor) & Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel (Series Editor) (ed.),Inflation Targeting: Desing, Performance, Challenges, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 3, pages 079-170, Central Bank of Chile.
    18. Diana Barro & Elio Canestrelli, 2008. "Tracking error with minimum guarantee constraints," Working Papers 172, Department of Applied Mathematics, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia.
    19. Simone Casellina & Mariacristina Uberti, 2008. "Optimal Monetary Policy and Long-term Interest Rate Dynamics: Taylor Rule Extensions," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 32(1), pages 183-198, September.
    20. Jianming Xia, 2021. "Optimal Investment with Risk Controlled by Weighted Entropic Risk Measures," Papers 2112.02284, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:manchs:v:76:y:2008:i:3:p:279-300. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/semanuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.