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

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  • 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
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. 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.
    2. Suleyman Basak & Alex Shapiro & Lucie Teplá, 2006. "Risk Management with Benchmarking," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(4), pages 542-557, April.
    3. Schellekens, Phillip & Chadha, Jagjit, 1998. "Utility functions for central bankers: the not so drastic quadratic," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 119136, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
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    Cited by:

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

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