infonet-economy

In line with the conference theme - "Collegiality" - the authors propose to build a bridge between two Systems Approaches, namely System Dynamics (SD) and Management Cybernetics (MC). This synthesis is aimed at opening a path for a better capability to deal with complex issues of actors in both organizations and society. With their resprctive strengths - modelling and...

We analyze a Bayesian merger game under two-sided asymmetric information about firm types. We show that the standard prediction of the lemons market model–if any, only low-type firms are traded–is likely to be misleading: Merger returns, i.e. the difference between pre- and post-merger profits, are not necessarily higher for low-type firms. This has two implications. First, under...

Coping with complexity is at the heart of the systems approach. Several methodologies can be discerned which have proved to possess extraordinary power in dealing with complex issues. System dynamics is a general-purpose methodology for modelling and simulation employed in order to deal with dynamic complexity. Cybernetics has brought forth structural models to enable organizations...

In recent years, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has come under sustained attack from many academics and other observers. Many of the arguments employed in this attack are found in Professor Morrissey's paper and the purpose of this comment is to critically examine them. Professor Morrissey's principal argument is that the likelihood of successfully completing...

This paper intends to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and in which interesting directions it might develop. First, the current state of the research on happiness in economics is briefly discussed. We emphasize the potential of happiness research in testing competing theories of individual behavior. Second, the crucial issue of causality is...

We show experimentally that a principal's distrust in the voluntary performance of an agent has a negative impact on the agent's motivation to perform well. Before the agent chooses his performance, the principal in our experiment decides whether he wants to restrict the agents' choice set by implementing a minimum performance level for the agent. Since both parties...

Empirical studies on the relationship between income and happiness commonly use standard ordered response models, the most well-known representatives being the ordered logit and the ordered probit. However, these models restrict the marginal probability effects by design, and therefore limit the analysis of distributional aspects of a change in income, that is, the study of whether...