ECONOMISTS have been interested in the accuracy of anticipations for two reasons. First, effective countercyclical policy depends on accurate forecasts of future investment, inventories, sales, etc. Second, the degree of accuracy of anticipations has implications about the way anticipations are formed. This paper deals with the accuracy of sales anticipations. The source of the data on anticipations is the Annual Survey of Business Anticipations of Sales collected by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Commerce. The only systematic study of these data has been conducted by Modigliani and Weingartner.2 In the first section, we test whether sales anticipations are more accurate than the forecasts of several naive models and whether anticipations correctly predict the direction of change of sales. Next, we test Theil's hypothesis that predictions refer to a shorter period than they are supposed to. In the last section of the paper, an accuracy measure proposed by Theil is adopted to determine (1) whether an accurate forecaster is less likely to commit systematic forecasting errors and (2) whether anticipations conform to the rational expectations hypothesis. Nature of the Data

This paper demonstrates that mall store contracts are written to internalize externalities through both an efficient allocation and pricing of space, and an efficient allocation of incentives across stores. Certain stores generate externalities by drawing customers to other stores, whereas many stores primarily benefit from external mall traffic. Therefore, to varying degrees, the success of each store depends upon the presence and effort of other stores, and the effort of the developer to attract customers to the mall. Using a unique data set of mall tenant contracts, we show that rental contracts are written to (i) efficiently price the net externality of each store and (ii) align the incentives to induce optimal effort by the developer and each mall store according to the externality of each store's effort.