infonet-economy

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) has become an important tool in analyzing the financial situation of insurance companies. Constant development and documentation of DFA tools has occurred during the last years. However, several questions concerning the implementation of DFA systems have not been answered in the DFA literature to date. One such important issue is the consideration of...

Trust and betrayal of trust are ubiquitous in human societies. Recent behavioral evidence shows that the neuropeptide oxytocin increases trust among humans, thus offering a unique chance of gaining a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying trust and the adaptation to breach of trust. We examined the neural circuitry of trusting behavior by combining the intranasal,...

One can be independent, or one can be subject to decisions made by others. This paper argues that this difference, embodied in the institutional distinction between the decision-making procedures ‘market’ and ‘hierarchy’, affects individual wellbeing beyond outcomes. Taking self-employment as an important case of independence, it is shown that the self-employed derive higher...

The paper analyzes the e?ects of more intense competition on ?rms’ incentives to invest in process innovations. We carry out experiments based on two-stage games, where R&D investment choices are followed by product market competition. As predicted by theory, an increase in the number of ?rms from two to four reduces investments. However, a positive e?ect is observed for a switch...

We consider an economy where decision maker(s) do not know the true production function for a public good. By using Bayes rule they can learn from experience. We show that the economy may learn the truth, but that it may also converge to an inefficient policy where no further inference is possible so that the economy is stuck in an information trap. We also show that our results are...

We provide a systematic comparison of punishment from unaffected third parties and affected second parties using a within-subject design in ten simple games. We apply the classification analysis by El-Gamal and Grether (1995) and find that a parsimonious model assuming subjects are either envious or selfish best explains the punishment from both third and second parties. Third and...

The paper characterizes the mixed-strategy equilibria in all-pay auctions with endogenous prizes that depend positively on own e?ort and negatively on the e?ort of competitors. Such auctions arise naturally in the context of investment games, lobbying games, and promotion tournaments. We also provide an experimental analysis of a special case which captures the strategic situation of...

It is frequently noted that investment funds with a nonnormal return distribution cannot be adequately evaluated using the classic Sharpe ratio. However, recent research compared the Sharpe ratio with other performance measures and found virtually identical rank ordering using hedge fund data. We extend this research by analyzing a large data set of 38,954 funds investing in seven...