This paper discusses recent neuroeconomic evidence related to other-regarding behaviors and the decision to trust in other people’s other-regarding behavior. This evidencensupports the view that people derive nonpecuniary utility (i) from mutual cooperation in socialndilemma (SD) games and (ii) from punishing unfair behavior. Thus, mutual cooperation and the punishment of free riders in SD games is not irrational, but better understood as rationalnbehavior of people with corresponding social preferences. We also report the results of anrecent study that examines the impact of the neuropeptide Oxytocin (OT) on trusting andntrustworthy behavior in a sequential SD. Animal studies have identified Oxytocin as anhormone that induces prosocial approach behavior, suggesting that it may also affect prosocialnbehavior in humans. Indeed, the study shows that subjects given Oxytocin exhibit much morentrusting behavior, suggesting that OT has a direct impact on certain aspects of subjects’ social preferences. Interestingly, however, although Oxytocin affects trusting behavior, it has no effect on subjects’ trustworthiness.
"Recent monetary models with explicit microfoundations are made tractable by assumingnthat agents have access to centralized markets after one round of decentralized trade. Given quasi-linear preferences, this makes the distribution of money degenerate — which keeps the models simple but precludes discussion of distributional effects of monetary policy. We generalize these models by assuming two rounds of trade before agents can readjust their money holdings to study a range of new distributional effects analytically. We show that unexpected symmetric lump-sum money injections may increase short-run output and welfare,nwhile asymmetric injections may increase long-run output and welfare."
This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents’ production technologies display learning effects and agents’ rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show that whether learning effects are over- or under-exploited crucially depends on whether learning effects increase or decrease the principal’s uncertainty about agents’ costs of production. Hence, what drives the over- or under-exploitation of learning effects is whether more efficient agents also learn faster (so costs diverge through learning effects) or whether it is the less efficient agents who learn faster (so costs converge). Furthermore, we show that if divergence in costs through learning effects is strong enough, learning effects will not be exploited at all, in a sense to be made precise.
Recent advances in the econometric modelling of count data have often been based on the generalized method of moments (GMM). However, the two-step GMM procedure may perform poorly in small samples, and several empirical likelihood-based estimators have been suggested alternatively. In this paper I discuss empirical likelihood (EL) estimation for count data models with endogenous regressors. I carefully distinguish between parametric and semi-parametric methods and analyze the properties of the EL estimator by means of a Monte Carlo experiment. I apply the proposed method to estimate the effect of women’s schooling on fertility.
We consider a repeated stochastic coordination game with imperfect public monitoring. In the game any pattern of coordinated play is a perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Moreover, standard equilibrium selection argumentsneither have no bite or they select an equilibrium that is not observed in actual plays of the game. We give experimental evidence for a unique equilibrium selection and explain this very robust finding by equilibrium selection based on behavioral arguments, in particular focal point analysis,nprobability matching and over-confidence. Our results have interesting applicationsnin finance because the observed equilibrium exhibits momentum,nreversal and excess volatility. Moreover, the results may help to explain why technical analysis is a commonly observed investment style.
We consider a closed economy where a risk neutral bank competes with a competitive bond market. Firms can finance a risky project either by a bank credit or by issuing a bond which is directly sold to risk averse investors who also hold safe deposits at the bank. We show that the bank tends to allocate more capital to lower quality projects but there are some interesting qualifications. If the asymmetric information concerns only the success probability, then we observe adverse selection while if it concerns only the expected return, bad types are driven out of the market.
Objectives - Preferences of both Alzheimer patients and their spouse caregivers are related to a willingness-to-pay (WTP) measure which is used to test for the presence of mutual (rather than the conventional one-way) altruism. Methods - Identical contingent valuation interviews were conducted in 2000 - 2002 for 126 Alzheimer patients and their caregiving spouses living in the Zurich metropolitan area (Switzerland). We elicit WTP three hypothetical treatments of the demented patient. The treatment Stabilization prevents the worsening of the disease, bringing dementia to a standstill. Cure restores patient health to its original level. In No burden, dementia takes its normal course while caregiver’s burden is reduced to its level before the disease. Results - Different characteristics of therapies are reflected in differences in WTP values. Accepting WTP values as expression of preferences, one finds that patients do not rank Cure higher than No burden; implying that their WTP is entirely altruistic. Caregiving spouses rank Cure before Burden, some 40 percent of their WTP reflecting an altruistic motive again. Discussion - The evidence suggests that WTP values are reliable measures of subjective preferences even in Alzheimer patients. Using this indicator, it is found that only caregivers have extra WTP for Cure, implying that curing dementia has value exclusively to them.
We analyze a Bayesian merger game under two-sided asymmetric information about firm types. We show that the standard prediction of the lemons market model–if any, only low-type firms are traded–is likely to be misleading: Merger returns, i.e. the difference between pre- and post-merger profits, are not necessarily higher for low-type firms. This has two implications. First, under very general conditions, equilibria exist where mergers take place, and there is no presumption that there is ineffciently low trade. Second, in these equilibria it is typically not the case that only low-type firms enter an agreement.
Empirical studies on the relationship between income and happiness commonly use standard ordered response models, the most well-known representatives being the ordered logit and the ordered probit. However, these models restrict the marginal probability effects by design, and therefore limit the analysis of distributional aspects of a change in income, that is, the study of whether the income effect depend on a person’s happiness. In this paper we pinpoint the shortcomings of standard models and propose two alternatives, namely generalized threshold and sequential models. With data of two waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel, 1984 and 1997, we show that the more general models yield different marginal probability effects than standard models.
In the literature on optimal indemnity schedules, indemnities are usually restricted to be non-negative. Gollier (1987) shows that this constraint might well bind: insured could get higher expected utility if insurance contracts would allow payments from the insured to the insurer at some losses. However, due to the insurers’ cost function Gollier supposes, the optimal insurance contract he derives underestimates the relevance of the non-negativity constraint on indemnities. This paper extends Gollier’s findings by allowing for negative indemnity payments for a broader class of insurers’ cost functions.
