Nonlinear Versus Linear Learning Devices: A Procedural Perspective

  • Authors:
  • Emilio Barucci;Leonardo Landi

  • Affiliations:
  • DIMADEFAS, Università di Firenze, Via C. Lombroso 6/17, 50134 Firenze, Italy, tel: +39-55-4223936, fax: +39-55-4223944, e-mail: barucci@stat.ds.unifi.it;Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Università di Firenze, Via S. Marta 3, 50139 Firenze, Italy, tel: +39-55-4796365, fax: +39-55-4796363, landi@aguirre.ing.unifi.it

  • Venue:
  • Computational Economics
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

We provide a discussion of bounded rationality learning behindtraditional learning mechanisms, i.e., Recursive Ordinary Least Squares andBayesian Learning . These mechanisms lack for many reasons a behavioralinterpretation and, following the Simon criticism, they appear to be’substantively rational‘. In this paper, analyzing the Cagan model, weexplore two learning mechanisms which appear to be more plausible from abehavioral point of view and somehow ’procedurally rational‘: Least MeanSquares learning for linear models and Back Propagation for ArtificialNeural Networks . The two algorithms look for a minimum of the variance ofthe error forecasting by means of a steepest descent gradient procedure. Theanalysis of the Cagan model shows an interesting result: non-convergence oflearning to the Rational Expectations Equilibrium is not due to therestriction to linear learning devices; also Back Propagation learning forArtificial Neural Networks may fail to converge to the RationalExpectations Equilibrium of the model.