Expectational coordination in simple economic contexts. Concepts and analysis with emphasis on strategic substituabilities (Q540419)

The paper is concerned with the nature and quality of expectational coordination in economic situations. More specifically, it considers an economic model that features a continuum of agents and an aggregate state of the world over which agents have an infinitesimal influence, and examines coordination in a variety of economic contexts. First, the model is presented and interpreted successively and equivalently as a game with a continuum of agents and as an economic model. Then, attention is switched to equilibria and to what may be called the expectational quality or plausibility or robustness of equilibria. The adopted viewpoint is eductive in the sense that it refers to the reasoning of agents attempting to guess the actions or guesses of others. Then again, attention is switched to what the authors call state point rationalisability and state rationalisability and on the corresponding concepts of strong rationality. Emphasis is also put on local counterparts to the concepts that lead to stress local rather than global expectational stability of equilibria. The main application of the former general analysis follows, which concerns economies with strategic substitutabilities and shows that in the world with strategic substitutabilities under consideration, expectational stability is still easy to analyse. Finally, the adaptation at the local level of the different criteria under scrunity is considered, and it is shown that lead to the same expectational stability conclusions, only when there are local strategic complementarities or strategic substitutabilities. However, for the local stability analysis, it is demonstrated that one can, most often, forget about stochastic expectations and concentrate on heterogeneous point expectations.