infonet-economy

"At present, new EU-members have to fully accept the ""acquis communautaire"" even if their economic and institutional development differs drastically from the EU-average. In contrast, we propose that there should be the possibility of partial entry into the EU. East European Countries should have the option of specifically entering with respect to functions...

"This paper presents a formal theory of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones. The theory takes into account that people evaluate the kindness of an action not only by it’s consequences but also by the intention underlying this action. The theory explains the relevant stylized facts of a wide range of experimental games....

"- This paper replaces the paper ""Existence and Uniqueness of Equilibria in the CAPM"" -nIn the standard CAPM with a riskless asset we give a sufficient condition for uniqueness. This condition is a joint restriction on the agents' endowments and their preferences which is compatible with non-increasing absolute risk aversion and which is in particular...

"Most contracts, whether between voters and politicians or between house owners and contractors, are incomplete. ""More law,"" it typically is assumed, increases the likelihood of contract performance by increasing the probability of enforcement and/or the cost of breach. This paper studies a contractual relationship where the first mover has to decide...

The impact of the time horizon upon the risk of equity investments is still a controversial issue. In this paper, we analyse long-term risk in a portfolio insurance framework based on option pricing theory. The insurance strategies are implemented alternatively with a portfolio of stocks and put options or bonds and call options. The risk of stock holdings is measured by the...

This study applies conjoint analysis (CA) to estimate the marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) of elderly individuals for a reduction of the risk of fracture of the femur. The good in question are hypothetical hip protectors which lower the risk of a fracture by different amounts. Other attributes are ease of handling, wearing comfort, and out-of-pocket cost. Thus, the novelty of the...

The paper takes a closer look at cultural festivals such as musical or operatic festivals. From an economic viewpoint the paper shows that such festivals offer great artistic and economic opportunities, but that at the same time these opportunities are also easy to destroy. Empirical evidence from the Salzburg Festival show that government support can have negative effects on the...

This paper studies a network provider's incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. In a simple but general framework, we investigate how various institutional settings affect investment incentives. We show that under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives are smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration. We consider two strategies for...

Money illusion means that people behave differently when the same objective situation is represented in nominal terms rather than in real terms. This paper shows that seemingly innocuous differences in payoff representation cause pronounced differences in nominal price inertia indicating the behavioral importance of money illusion. In particular, if the payoff information is...