Advocates of the rational-expectations approach predict that a credible policy to lower inflation will result in a loss of output that is ______ than expected based on the sacrifice ratio. larger the same smaller sometimes larger and sometimes slower

The theory of rational expectations is a hypothesis of economic science that states that predictions about the future value of economically relevant variables made by agents are not systematically wrong and that errors are random (white noise). An alternative formulation is that rational expectations are "consistent expectations around a model," that is, in a model, agents assume that the predictions of the model are valid. The rational expectations hypothesis is used in many contemporary macroeconomic models, in game theory and in applications of rational choice theory.

Since most current macroeconomic models study decisions over several periods, the expectations of workers, consumers and companies about future economic conditions are an essential part of the model. There has been much discussion about how to model these expectations and the macroeconomic predictions of a model may differ depending on the assumptions about the expectations (see the web's theorem). To assume rational expectations is to assume that the expectations of economic agents can be individually wrong, but correct on average. In other words, although the future is not totally predictable, it is assumed that the agents' expectations are not systematically biased and that they use all the relevant information to form their expectations on economic variables.