Discussion paper

DP18339 Growth and Likelihood

We examine a stochastic growth process that can alternatively be interpreted as a model of economic growth, financial portfolio management, statistical inference, or biological population growth. For the economic interpretation, we find that the growth-maximizing policy satisfies a meritocracy principle: it minimizes the discrepancy between the resource shares allocated to the agents and the agents' ``merits.'' For the statistical interpretation, the setting is equivalent to a model of predictive coding, in which a misspecified system maximizes the fit of data. A consistency principle analogous to the meritocracy principle requires the optimal fit to minimize a degree of Bayes inconsistency.

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Citation

Samuelson, L and J Steiner (2023), ‘DP18339 Growth and Likelihood‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 18339. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp18339