infonet-economy

Despite the importance of gathering technological knowledge from external sources, many firms are not well-placed to collect information from beyond their own boundaries. Government policies designed to improve access to technological knowledge often encourage firms to develop strong ties with competitors, suppliers or customers. But although strong ties are valuable, especially when...

This paper presents DELI, a new interactive tool for supporting new product development decisions. DELI addresses the `chicken and egg` problem in new product development: a product's features shape the way that the market is segmented and targeted, but that very segmentation/targeting itself determines which features the product needs to incorporate. It is very useful,...

"Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others’ trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product market competition. Equilibria with and without training, and multiple equilibria can emerge. If...

Allocating people into social programmes on the basis of statistical tools has gained increasing acceptance in recent years. The need for better targeting of active labour market programmes recently has arisen in Switzerland, too. Statistically assisted programme allocation could be an effective tool to increase the effectiveness of labour market policies. It is a software tool that...

Successful estimation of the Pareto tail index from extreme order statistics relies heavily on the procedure used to determine the number of extreme order statistics that are used for the estimation. Most of the known procedures are based on the minimization of (an estimate of) the asymptotic mean square error of the Hill estimator for the Pareto tail index. The principal drawback of...

Mixed linear models are used to analyse data in many settings. These models have in most cases a multivariate normal formulation. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) or the residual MLE (REML) are usually chosen to estimate the parameters. However, the latter are based on the strong assumption of exact multivariate normality. Welsh and Richardson (1997) have shown that these...