infonet-economy

This paper examines the causes and effects of mobile number portability (MNP) and provides a survey of its implementation in Europe. It first examines the competitive effects and costs of introducing MNP. Next, it discusses how to charge for MNP. It argues that a price cap regime starting from the average cost of porting is likely to provide appropriate incentives. Finally, it...

“Evaluitis” - i.e. ex post assessments of organizations and persons - has become a rapidly spreading disease. In addition to the well-known costs imposed on evaluees and evaluators, additional significant costs are commonly disregarded: incentives are distorted, ossification is induced and the decision approach is wrongly conceived. As a result, evaluations are used too often and too...

In the television show Affari Tuoi an individual faces a sequence of binary choicesnbetween a risky lottery with equiprobable prizes of up to half a million euros and anmonetary amount for certain. The decisions of 114 show participants are used to test the predictions of ten decision theories: risk neutrality, expected utility theory, fanning-out hypothesis (weighted utility theory...

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) question the relevance of inequity aversionnin simple dictator game experiments claiming that a combination of a preference fornefficiency and a Rawlsian motive for helping the least well-off is more important thanninequity aversion. We show that these results are partly based on a strong subject poolneffect. The participants of the E&S...

Die Saläre der Spitzensportler und der Topmanager sind stark gestiegen. Gemeinsame Triebkräfte dieser Entwicklung sind Hebeleffekte. Die Hauptrollen spielen nach Meinung der Autoren bei Topmanagern Entscheidungs- und bei Spitzensportlern mediale Hebel. (Red.)

DEUTSCH: Dieser Beitrag setzt sich zum Ziel, zwei miteinander verbundene Fragen zu
beantworten: 1. Was ist der Auftrag der Krankenversicherung? Oder in anderen
Worten: Warum gibt es eine Nachfrage nach sozialer (bzw. staatlicher)
Krankenversicherung? Ist sie der Grund dafu¨ r, dass in den meisten entwickelten
La¨ndern die private Krankenversicherung ein...

We conducted an experiment to describe how social learners use information about the relation between payoffs and behavior. Players chose between twontechnologies repeatedly. Payoffs were random, but one technology was better because its expected payoff was higher. Players were divided into two groups:n1) individual learners who knew their realized payoffs after each choice andn2)...