Muhammed Bulutay

Biography
I am a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the Technical University of Berlin and the Berlin School of Economics. My advisors are Frank Heinemann and Georg Weizsäcker.
My main research interests are in the field of behavioral economics, with a focus on expectation formation and information processing. I put special emphasis on causality and therefore design experiments to address my research questions.
News
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I will be visiting Oxford University between 29 November - 5 December.
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I will be presenting an experimental design at the CESS Nuffield Colloquium on 29 November (click here for details and to participate via zoom).
Research Interests
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Bounded rationality
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Expectations
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Strategic uncertainty
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Communication
Education
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Ph.D. in Economics, 2024
Technical University of Berlin
Berlin School of Economics -
M.Sc. in Economics & Psychology, 2019
University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Université Paris Cité -
B.Sc. in Economics, 2017
University of Galatasaray
Working Papers
Job Market Paper
Better than Perceived? Correcting Misperceptions about Central Bank Inflation Forecasts
Should central banks communicate the performance of their past inflation forecasts to the public? If the public underestimates the central bank's forecast performance, such communication can make inflation forecasts more effective and build trust with the public. To test these predictions, I incorporate an information provision experiment (N=5527) into the Bundesbank's Survey on Consumer Expectations. The experiment informs a random subset of respondents about the past performance of the European Central Bank's (ECB's) inflation forecasts after measuring the perceived performance. The results show that the majority of households underestimate the ECB's performance. The intervention strengthens the anchoring of expectations, reduces inflation uncertainty, and discourages consumption of durable goods. An analysis of the causal mechanisms reveals that trust in the ECB plays a mediating role in the treatment effects. Thus, central banks can build trust with the public through transparency when they are misperceived.
Publications
Measuring strategic uncertainty attitudes
with Lisa Bruttel, Camille Cornand, Frank Heinemann, Adam Zylbersztejn.
Experimental Economics, 2023, 26, p.p. 522-549.
Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
with Huber C., Dreber, A., Huber, J., +91 others, and Holzmeister F.
PNAS, 2023, 120(23).
Learning to deal with repeated shocks under strategic complementarity: An experiment
with Camille Cornand, Adam Zylbersztejn.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, 200, p.p. 1318-1343.
Imperfect tacit collusion and asymmetric price transmission
with David Hales, Patrick Julius, Weiwei Tasch.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2021, 192, p.p. 584-599.
Work-in-progress
Irrational inattention
with Ciril Bosch-Rosa, Bernhard Kassner.
Data analysis stage.
Rational inattention and overconfidence influence the way information is processed, leading individuals to underreact to new information. Yet, even if their effects go in the same direction, they are fundamentally different. While rational inattention characterizes an optimal behavior, overprecision is a bias. In this paper, we develop a belief formation model where overprecise agents optimally decide how much attention to pay to information. This allows us to disentangle the effect of overprecision from rational inattention when the costs to process information change. The results show that overprecision distorts the optimization problem of rationally inattentive agents, making them more sensitive to changes in the marginal cost of information and less likely to update in response to new information. Such an effect adds a new layer of heterogeneity in the way that individuals react to changes in information processing costs. We support the predictions of our model using a randomized information provision experiment on a representative sample of the German population and show that overprecise.
What does it mean to trust a central bank?
Data analysis stage.