infonet-economy

Reputation formation pervades human social life. In fact, many people go to great lengths to acquire a good reputation, even though building a good reputation is costly in many cases. Little is known about the neural underpinnings of this important social mechanism, however. In the present study, we show that disruption of the right, but not the left, lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC)...

Promises are one of the oldest human-specific psychological mechanisms fostering cooperation and trust. Here, we study the neural underpinnings of promise keeping and promise breaking. Subjects first make a promise decision (promise stage), then they anticipate whether the promise affects the interaction partner's decision (anticipation stage), and are subsequently free to keep...

Class specific mortality in 17th and 18th Century Vienna shows a cyclical pattern which is related to grain price cycles in the 5-10 years range. This relationship is not stable over time. Applying spectral analysis based on time-varying VARs, it can be shown that at the beginning of the observation period, comovement of grain prices and mortality is considerably high in areas...

The credibility of standard instrumental variables assumptions is often under dispute. This paper imposes weak monotonicity in order to gain information on counterfactual outcomes, but avoids independence or exclusion restrictions. The outcome process is assumed to be sequentially ordered, building up and depending on the information level of agents. The potential outcome...

This paper analyses the impact of increasing the share of apprentices at the cost of the share of unskilled or semi-skilled employees on establishment performance. We use representative matched employer–employee panel data and correct for estimation biases. We show that an increase of the apprentice share in trade, commercial, craft or construction occupations has a positive impact...

Survey and option data are used to take a fresh look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data suggests that investors tend to overestimate the volatility of equity returns. Both facts contribute towards solving the puzzle. However, data on beliefs about...

Firm-hosted virtual peer-to-peer problem solving (P3) communities offer a low-cost, credible, and effective means of delivering education and ongoing assistance services to customers of complex, frequently evolving products. Building upon the social constructivist view on learning and drawing from literature on the firm-customer relationship in services marketing, we distinguish...

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment on network formation among heterogeneous agents. The experimental design extends the Bala-Goyal (2000) model of network formation with decay and two-way flow of benefits by introducing agents with lower linking costs or higher benefits to others. Furthermore, agents' types may be common knowledge or private information. In...