A COMPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE ISSUE OF TIME INCONSISTENCY REVISITED AS AN EXTENDED GAME

Cellini and Lambertini endogenize through a timing game the moves of the central bank and the private sector in a model of monetary policy la Barro and Gordon. They find a multiplicity of equilibria, as the two Stackelberg outcomes emerge as the solutions of the timing game, with different inflation levels. By using the risk-dominance criterion to select the equilibrium we prove that there is a discontinuity in the inflation bias, depending on the inflation aversion of the private sector.

A NOTE ON THE ANCHORING EFFECT OF EXPLICIT INFLATION TARGETS

Empirical literature provided convincing evidence that explicit (i.e., legislated) inflation targets anchor expectations. I propose a novel game theoretic framework with generalized timing that allows us to formally capture this beneficialanchoring effect. Using the framework I identify several factors that influence whether and how strongly expectations are anchored, namely (i) the public's cost of decision making, (ii) the public's inflation aversion, (iii) the slope of the Phillips curve, (iv) the magnitude of supply shocks, (v) the degree of central bank conservatism, and under many (but not all) circumstances, (vi) the explicitness of the inflation target.