infonet-economy

Higher-dimensional symmetric games become of more and more importance for applied micro- and macroeconomic research. Standard approaches to uniqueness of equilibria have the drawback that they are restrictive or not easy to evaluate analytically. In this paper I provide some general but comparably simple tools to verify whether a symmetric game has a unique symmetric equilibrium or...

Ein grundlegenderes Verständnis der peripheren okulomotorischen Pathophysiologie könnte zur Verbesserung der Strabismuschirurgie beitragen. Konventionelle strabologische Untersuchungsmethoden sind hilfreich, um Augenmotilitätsstörungen zu erkennen. Dennoch ist in komplexen Fällen eine präzise Diagnose mit den pathophysiologischen Erkenntnissen, die durch diese Untersuchungen und mit...

What impact has financial globalization had on risk sharing? In theory, financial globalization
should improve international consumption risk sharing. While the answer to this question is of
utmost policymaking concern, results in the empirical literature are inconclusive. The paper
surveys the extant literature and tries to identify which factors influence the...

This chapter applies a comparative view to evaluate initiatives and referendums in the context of Constitutional change. Instruments of direct democratic decision making are compared to those of a purely representative democratic system in which members of parliament decide Constitutional issues like basic rights, the scope of democratic decision making and market exchange, the...

Social tensions impede social cohesion and public goods provision, and can be a driving force for more serious conflicts such as civil wars. Surprisingly, the emergence of social tensions has been studied only rarely in the literature. In the present contribution a game-theoretic model highlights how reputation concerns and the structure of group cleavages matter for the emergence of...

How do we make decisions when confronted with several alternatives (e.g., on a supermarket shelf)? Previous work has shown that accumulator models, such as the drift-diffusion model, can provide accurate descriptions of the psychometric data for binary value-based choices, and that the choice process is guided by visual attention. However, the computational processes used to make...

Any occasional changes in the acoustic environment are of potential importance for survival. In humans, the preattentive detection of such changes generates the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related brain potentials. MMN is elicited to rare changes ('deviants') in a series of otherwise regularly repeating stimuli ('standards'). Deviant stimuli are...

Parental leave regulations in most OECD countries have two key policy instruments: jobprotection and cash benefits. This paper studies how mothers’ return to work behavior andlabor market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of these key policy parameters.Exploiting a series of major parental leave policy changes in Austria, we find that longer cashbenefits lead to a...