The Adaptive Expectations Hypothesis posits that individuals form their expectations about the future based on past experiences and trends. According to this theory, people adjust their expectations gradually as new information becomes available, leading to a lagged response to changes in economic conditions. This means that if an economic variable, such as inflation, deviates from previous levels, individuals will update their expectations about future inflation slowly, rather than instantaneously. Mathematically, this can be represented as:
where is the expected value at time , is the actual value at time , and is a constant that determines how quickly expectations adjust. This hypothesis is often contrasted with rational expectations, where individuals are assumed to use all available information to predict future outcomes more accurately.
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