infonet-economy

The UNESCO World Heritage List contains the 900 most treasured Sites of humanity’s culture and landscapes.nThe World Heritage List is beneficial where heritage sites are undetected, disregarded by national decision-makers, not commercially exploitable, and where national financial resources, political control and technical knowledge for conservation are inadequate.nAlternatives such...

Museums have many different goals beyond efficiency such as social equity, financial revenue, attracting donors and gaining international, regional or local prestige. Various pricing schemes are being discussed with the aim of reaching these goals. Thenclassical ones are entry prices and free entry. The museum club solution or exit donationsnallow for various additional goals. Each...

Mathematical models of scientific data can be formally compared using Bayesian model evidence. Previous applications in the biological sciences have mainly focussed on model selection in which one first selects the model with the highest evidence and then makes inferences based on the parameters of that model. This "best model" approach is very useful but can become brittle...

Both perceptual inference and motor responses are shaped by learned probabilities. For example, stimulus-induced responses in sensory cortices and preparatory activity in premotor cortex reflect how (un)expected a stimulus is. This is in accordance with predictive coding accounts of brain function, which posit a fundamental role of prediction errors for learning and adaptive behavior...

In recent years, a number of governments and consumer groups in rich countries have tried to discourage the use of child labor in poor countries through measures such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards. The purported objective of such measures is to reduce the incidence of child labor in developing countries and thereby improve children’s welfare...

Academic rankings today are the backbone of research governance, which seem to fit the aims of “new public management” on the one side and the idea of the “republic of science” on the other side. Nevertheless rankings recently came under scrutiny. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of academic rankings, in particular their unintended negative consequences on the research process...

Zur Erklärung der mit Aktienanlagen verbundenen Renditen und Renditeerwartungen wurde verschiedentlich das dem CAPM entsprechende Einfaktormodell zu Mehrfaktormodellen erweitert. Als zusätzliche Faktoren werden seit Chen / Roll / Ross (1986) makroökonomische Variablen favorisiert. Fama und French (1993-98) wählen als Faktoren die Renditen spezieller Long-Short-Portfolios. Diese...