infonet-economy

This article explores use of auctions for privatising public assets. In our model, a single ‘insider’ bidder possesses information about the asset's common value. Bidders are privately informed about their costs of exploiting the asset. Due to the insider's presence, uninformed bidders face a strong winner's curse in standard auctions. We show that the optimal…

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic interactions has proven to be elusive. It is still not clear whether trust is just an…

This paper presents a new incentive compatible method for measuring confidence in own know-ledge. This method consists of two parts. First, an individual answers several general knowledge questions. Second, the individual chooses among three alternatives: (1) one question is selected at random and the individual receives a payoff if he or she has answered this question correctly; (2…

The paper investigates the relationship between pro-social norms and its implications for improved environmental outcomes. This is an area, which has been neglected in the environmental economics literature. We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate a robust link between perceived environmental cooperation (reduced public littering) and
increased voluntary environmental…

BACKGROUND: Biomedical research is changing due to the rapid accumulation of experimental data at an unprecedented scale, revealing increasing degrees of complexity of biological processes. Life Sciences are facing a transition from a descriptive to a mechanistic approach that reveals principles of cells, cellular networks, organs, and their interactions across several spatial and…

Functional integration in the brain rests on anatomical connectivity (the presence of axonal connections) and effective connectivity (the causal influences mediated by these connections). The deployment of anatomical connections provides important constraints on effective connectivity, but does not fully determine it, because synaptic connections can be expressed functionally in a…

The phenomenon of empathy entails the ability to share the affective experiences of others. In recent years social neuroscience made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms that enable a person to feel what another is feeling. The present review provides an in-depth and critical discussion of these findings. Consistent evidence shows that sharing the emotions of others is…

The insula has consistently been shown to be involved in processing stimuli that evoke the emotional response of disgust. Recently, its specificity for processing disgust has been challenged and a broader role of the insula in the representation of interoceptive information has been suggested. Studying the temporal dynamics of insula activation during emotional processing can…