infonet-economy

Building on the enactment perspective and past work on the self-fulfilling prophecy, this paper explores how organizational decline can be enacted through self-fulfilling prophecies of decline. We present two self-fulfilling prophecy-based models of organizational decline, one in which decline is enacted unintentionally through the predictions of an organization's managers, and...

The paper investigates the effect of interest policy on price bubbles, trading behavior and portfolio choice in experimental stock markets. Anseries of experiments has 8 participants trade an asset over 15 periods. Alternatively, the participants can invest money in interest-bearing bonds. Treatment groups are subjected to an endogenous interest policy, while control groups...

Experimental games turned out to be remarkably productive tools for examining the nature of social preferences and social norms. This paper describes the methods and tools of experimental game theory and provides a selection of games that have been useful. We also discuss the role of evolutionary explanations of and social preference theory in organizing the data in a coherent way....

This paper investigates the role of fiat money in decentralized markets, where producers have private information about the quality of the goods they supply. Money is divisible, terms of trade are determined endogenously, and agents can finance their consumption with money or with real production. When the fraction of high quality producers in the economy is given, money promotes the...

"We use alternative assumptions about the divisibility of goods and money and thenability of agents to use lotteries on money to investigate to what extent the indivisi-bilitynof money is the cause for the typically ine .cient production and consumption decisions in search-theoretic models of money. Our framework potentially generates three types of inefficiencies: the no-trade...

Many people believe that economists in general are more selfish than other people and that this greater selfishness is due to economics education. This paper offers empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set on giving behaviour in connection with two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economics education does not make people...

This paper analyzes the impact of the Austrian Regional Extended Benefit Program (REBP) on the labor market outcomes for elderly workers in Austria. The REBP extended entitlement to regular unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to a maximum of 209 weeks for elderly individuals in certain regions. This policy change created a large-scale quasi-experimental situation from which a lot can...

In this paper, the authors develop a model to predict collected amounts of glass at the regional level of municipalities. Learning about the factors that influence the amount of collected glass is a prerequisite for the evaluation and reorganisation of collection systems. Furthermore, such a model provides essential input for decisions like restructuring activities, implementation of...

"In many business transactions, in labor-management relations, in international conflicts, and welfare state reforms bargainers seem to hold strong entitlements that shape negotiations. Despite their importance, the role of entitlements in negotiations has not received much attention. We fill the gap by designing an experiment that allows us to measure the entitlements and to...