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Concept
Adaptive expectations
Summary
In economics, adaptive expectations is a hypothesized process by which people form their expectations about what will happen in the future based on what has happened in the past. For example, if people want to create an expectation of the inflation rate in the future, they can refer to past inflation rates to infer some consistencies and could derive a more accurate expectation the more years they consider.
One simple version of adaptive expectations is stated in the following equation, where is the next year's rate of inflation that is currently expected; is this year's rate of inflation that was expected last year; and is this year's actual rate of inflation:
where is between 0 and 1. This says that current expectations of future inflation reflect past expectations and an "error-adjustment" term, in which current expectations are raised (or lowered) according to the gap between actual inflation and previous expectations. The error-adjustment term, also called partial adjustment, allows for variations in inflation rates over the previous years, especially years that have abnormally high or low rates.
The above term is the partial adjustment error term, this term allows for variances that occur between actual values and expected values. The importance of considering the error prevents over and under expecting values of in the above example inflation rates. The adjustment means that the expectation can tend toward the direction of the future expected value that would be closer to the actual value, this allows a prediction to be made and consideration to be added or removed so as to be accurate of the future expectation. This consideration or error term is what allows the predicted value to be adaptable, thus creating an equation that is adaptive of the expectation being inferred.
The theory of adaptive expectations can be applied to all previous periods so that current inflationary expectations equal:
where equals actual inflation years in the past.
Official source
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