infonet-economy

We evaluate a randomized experiment of a statistical support system developed to assist caseworkers in Swiss employment offices in choosing appropriate active labour market programmes for their unemployed clients. This statistical support system predicted the labour market outcome for each programme and thereby suggested an 'optimal' labour market programme for each...

This paper presents models for search behavior and provides experimental evidence that behavioral heterogeneity in search is linked to heterogeneity in individual preferences. Observed search behavior is more consistent with a new model that assumes dynamic updating of utility reference points than with models that are based on expected-utility maximization. Specifically, reference...

An auctioneer wants to sell an indivisible object to one of multiple bidders, who have private information about their valuations of the object. A bidder's information structure determines the accuracy with which the bidder knows her private valuation. The main result of the paper is that the auctioneer's revenue is a convex function of bidders' information structures...

When premiums are community-rated, risk adjustment (RA) serves to mitigate competitive insurers’ incentive to select favorable risks. However, unless fully prospective, it also undermines their incentives for efficiency. By capping its volume, one may try to counteract this tendency, exposing insurers to some financial risk. This in term runs counter the quest to refine the RA...

The N-firm Cournot model with general technologies is reviewed to derive generalized and unified conditions for existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Tight conditions are formulated alternatively (i) in terms of concavity of two-sided transforms of inverse demand, or (ii) as linear constraintsnon the elasticities of inverse demand and its first derivative. These conditions...

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and that have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms — uniform and discriminatory price sealed-bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to tacitly or explicitly collude in order...

We study the effects of deliberation on collective decisions. In a series of experiments, we vary groups' preference distributions (between common and conflicting interests) and the institutions by which decisions are reached (simple majority, two-thirds majority, and unanimity). When deliberation is prohibited, different institutions generate significantly different outcomes,...