infonet-economy

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, how applying individualistic discourses to social relations in organizations rather hinders than facilitates change in organizations. The initial idea was to find out how social relations are constructed in organizations, thus de-focussing from the increasing popularity of concepts such as 'soft skills' or 'social competences…

Media companies generally enjoy increasing profits if more customers watch a program. The viewer drawing capability of stars serves as a prominent instrument to increase the audience. The literature distinguishes between two different types of stars: highly talented and therefore ‘self-made’ superstars, and famous but ‘manufactured’ and thus rather trivial celebrities. Whereas ‘self-…

We apply the recurrent reinforcement learning method of Moody, Wu, Liao, and Saffell (1998) in the context of the strategic asset allocation computed for sample data from US, UK, Germany, and Japan. It is found that the optimal asset allocation deviates substantially from the fixed-mix rule. The investor actively times the market and he is able to outperform it consistently over the…

In the course of history a large number of politicians has been assassinated. A rationalnchoice analysis is used to distinguish the expected marginal benefits of killing, and the marginal cost of attacking a politician. The comparative analysis of various equilibria helps us to gain insights into specific historical events.nThe analysis suggests that – in addition to well-known…

We discuss the ongoing liberalization process in the market for addressed letter mail in Switzerland. The core of the paper is an assessment of the liberalization's impact on the financial viability of various universal service obligations with and without access to the incumbent's downstream delivery network for customers and competitors. We propose a simple calibrated…

A new point estimator for the AR(1) coefficient in the linear regression model with arbitrary exogenous regressors and stationary AR(1) disturbances is developed. Its construction parallels that of the median--unbiased estimator, but uses the mode as a measure of central tendency. The mean--adjusted estimator is also considered, and saddlepoint approximations are used to lower the…

This paper provides field experimental evidence on the prevalence and determinants ofndiscrimination and in-group favoritism in trust decisions. We observe choices of aboutn1,000 inhabitants of the city of Zurich who take part in a sequential trust game, in whichnfirst movers can condition their investments on the residential districts of second movers.nOur main results can be…

To examine the impact of globalization on managerial compensation, we consider a matching model where a number of firms compete both in the product market and in the managerial market. We show that globalization, i.e. the simultaneous integration of product markets and managerial pools, leads to an increase in the heterogeneity of managerial salaries. Typically, while the most able…

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) models an insurance company's cash flow in order to forecast assets, liabilities, and ruin probabilities, as well as full balance sheets for different scenarios. In the last years DFA has become an important tool for the analysis of an insurance company's financial situation. The following article considers three aspects: First, we want to…