Research

The main research agenda of the Innovative Training Network ‘Expectations and  Social Influence Dynamics in Economics’ (ExSIDE) is to improve our understanding of the role of expectation formation and social influence for economic dynamics. Work in ExSIDE aims to develop models of expectation formation which have strong empirical micro-foundations and capture the importance of social influence dynamics. These models will be used to study the role of expectation formation processes and social influence for the dynamics of single markets (financial, labour, real investment…), for macroeconomic dynamics and for policy analysis.

Within the 15 individual research projects of ExSIDE different methodological approaches are employed and combined to study various aspects of this agenda. Fields relevant for work in ExSIDE, apart from standard approaches in dynamic economic modelling, include Behavioural Economics, Psychoanalysis, Opinion Formation, Network Theory and Agent-based Simulation.