Summary.
Following the seminal works of Schmeidler (1989), Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989), roughly put, an agent’s subjective beliefs are said to be ambiguous if the beliefs may not be represented by a unique probability distribution, in the standard Bayesian fashion, but instead by a set of probabilities. An ambiguity averse decision maker evaluates an act by the minimum expected value that may be associated with it. In spite of wide and long-standing support among economists for indexation of loan contracts there has been relatively little use of indexation, except in situations of extremely high inflation. The object of this paper is to provide a (theoretical) explanation for this puzzling phenomenon based on the hypothesis that economic agents are ambiguity averse. The paper considers a general equilibrium model based on Magill and Quinzii (1997) with ambiguity averse agents, where both nominal and indexed bond contracts are available for trade and all relevant prices are determined endogenously. We obtain conditions which prompt an endogenous cessation of trade in indexed bonds: i.e., conditions under which there is no trade in indexed bonds in any equilibrium; only nominal bonds are traded.
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Received: 7 April 2003, Revised: 8 March 2004,
JEL Classification Numbers:
D81, E31, D52, E44.
Correspondence to: Sujoy Mukerji
We thank seminar members at Birkbeck, Oxford, Paris I, Southampton and Tel Aviv, the audience at the ‘00 European Workshop on General Equilibrium Theory, and especially, E.Dekel, I. Gilboa, D. Schmeidler and A. Pauzner for helpful comments. The first author acknowledges financial assistance from an Economic and Social Research Council of U.K. Research Fellowship (# R000 27 1065). The second author thanks financial support from the French Ministry of Research (Action Concertée Incitative).
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Mukerji, S., Tallon, JM. Ambiguity aversion and the absence of indexed debt. Economic Theory 24, 665–685 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-004-0505-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-004-0505-5