infonet-economy

The paper explores a model of equilibrium selection in coordination games, where agents from an infinite population stochastically adjust their strategies to changes in their local environment. Instead of playing perturbed best-response, it is assumed that agents follow a rule of `switching to better strategies with higher probability'. This behavioral rule is related to bounded...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure and data from the German Socio- Economic Panel for the years 1995-1999. A number of modified count data models allow to estimate the effect of the reform in different parts of the distribution. The overall effect of the reform was a 10 percent reduction in the...

We investigate how various institutional settings affect a network provider’s incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. Under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives turn out to be smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration, though we also provide counter-examples. The introduction of downstream competition for the market can sometimes...

This work gives a brief overview of the portfolio selection problem following the mean-risk approach first proposed by Markowitz (1952). We consider various risk measures, i.e. variance, value-at-risk and expected-shortfall and we study the efficient frontiers obtained by solving the portfolio selection problem under these measures. We show that under the assumption that returns are...

We consider market dynamics in a reduced form model. In the simplest version, there are two investors and several small noninvesting firms. In each period, one investor can acquire a small firm, the other investor decides about market entry. After that all firms play an oligopoly game. We derive conditions under which increasing market concentration arises with myopic firms, we show...

This paper reports the results of a series of competitive labour market experiments in which subjects have the possibility to reciprocate favours. In the high stake condition subjects earned between two and three times their monthly income during the experiment. In the normal stake condition the stake level was reduced by a factor of ten. We observe that both in the high and the...

This paper surveys recent approaches towards lobbying if interest groups influence the decision of an incumbent government. It describes the two main channels of influence which mainly exist in parallel, namely contribution payments and the transmission of information through lobbying. Recent extensions to the two basic lobbying models are discussed in great detail. Thereafter...

This article argues, based on the work of Bakhtin and de Certeau, that there is no aesthetics without politics and that all academic discourse and practices are enacted through aesthetic forms with inherently political and ethical effects. The article is written in a script-form with indications on how to perform it, acting out or ‘performing' in a direct way rather than adding...

Präsentation vor der Generalversammlung 2002 der Lateinamerikanischen Handelskammer in der Schweiz; Zürich: Haus "Zum Rüden", 19. Juni 2002.#### Download der Präsentation (PDF-Datei, 245 KB)