Suchergebnisse

Studies of non-linear cobweb models have failed to address a fundamental issue: whether the complex dynamical behavior displayed by such models is consistent with the survival of producers. This paper shows that where borrowing is unconstrained, as is implicitly assumed in standard cobweb models, borrowing results in financial crises. Incorporating constraints on borrowing is needed to salvage cobweb models. Industry performance (in terms both of profitability and of the incidence of bankruptcies) is highly sensitive to the nature of such credit restrictions.

AbstractIn this paper, we study a class of markets, among which we can mention agricultural and energy markets, characterized by seasonality, i.e., in which demand and/or supply conditions cyclically alternate with a precise and known periodicity. We propose a new theoretical framework based on a cobweb model with adaptive expectations, accordingly modified to be consistent with market's seasonality. The model, consisting in a second-order non-autonomous difference equation, is investigated with the aim of understanding how the periodical nature of the market together with the agents' expectation formation mechanism affects the resulting dynamics. We analytically prove the emergence of dynamical scenarios that are missing in the classic cobweb model for non-seasonal markets, such as quasi-periodic dynamics and an ambiguous role on stability of the expectation weight. Finally, we discuss their economic rationale with the help of numerical simulations. In such a peculiar economic framework, agents' learning plays a key role to explain the dynamical properties of economic observables.