Individuals make systematic mistakes in their decisions, because they mispredict utility from choice options. When deciding, extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. Adaptation is neglected, recollection of feelings is distorted, decisions are rationalized and wrong intuitive theories of happiness are applied. People overestimate extrinsic attributes and therefore put too much emphasis on acquiring income and gaining status. In contrast, they underestimate intrinsic attributes and devote too littlentime to their family, friends or hobbies, which lowers their utility level. The theoreticalnanalysis is consistent with an econometric study on commuting decisions using reported subjective well-being data.
World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to NGOs having great influence. To address these problems, we propose international governance base on the democratic idea of citizen participation: All citizens of the member countries of international organizations have the potential right to participate in the decision-making of international organizations via initiatives, referendums and recalls. In order to reduce transaction costs, a representative group of citizens is randomly selected who can actually exercise their participation rights.
From a game theoretic point of view, fraudulent accounting to em-bellishnthe financial status of a firm and the use of drugs to enhancenperformance in sports are very similar. We study the replicator dy-namicsnof both applications within the same model. We allow for het-erogenousnpopulations, such as highly talented versus more mediocrenathletes, or high quality managers versus less able colleagues. Inter-estingly,nfor some parameters, the replicator dynamics is character-izednby cycles. Thus, we may see cycles of doping and clean sport,nand cycles of fraudulent and honest accounting. Moreover, in somencases, high ability players are more likely to commit fraud than lownability types.
"The self-employed are substantially more satisfied with their worknthan employed persons. We document this relationship for 23 countries andnshow that the higher job satisfaction can directly be attributed to thengreater autonomy that self-employed persons enjoy. ""Being your own boss""nseems to provide non-pecuniary benefits from work that point to thenexistence of procedural utility: autonomy is valued beyond outcomes as angood decision-making procedure. The results hold not only for WesternnEuropean, North American and former communist Eastern European countries,nbut largely also for countries with a non-western cultural background."
We suggest a simple asset market model in which we analyze competitive and strategic behaviornsimultaneously. If for competitive behavior two-fund separation holds across periods then itnalso holds for strategic behavior. In this case the relative prices of the assets do not dependnon whether agents behave strategically or competitively. Those agents acting strategically willnhowever invest less in the common mutual fund. Constant relative risk aversion and absencenof aggregate risk are shown to be two alternative sufficient conditions for two-period fundnseparation. With derivatives further strategic aspects arise and strategic behavior is distinctnfrom competitive behavior even for those utility functions leading to two-fund separation.
Terrorism will be high on the political agenda for many years to come. Various policies are open to a government fighting terrorism but, in any case, considerable costs are involved. In the competition for politicalnsupport, the costs and benefits of anti-terrorism policies will be debated. Better information about terrorism and its consequences can improve policy outcome if there is electoral competition. Over the last few years, economic scholars have analysed the effects terrorist acts have on various aspects of the economy. The findings of these impact studies are summarised in this paper. They capture, however, only part of the overall utility losses.nHence, several approaches to value public goods and conceptual issues concerning their application to terrorismnare discussed. In particular, the hedonic market approach, the averting behaviour method, the contingent valuation method and vote and popularity functions are reviewed. Further, an exploratory analysis of estimating individuals' utility losses using life satisfaction or happiness data is presented. This paper also discusses ansubstantially different approach combining measurement and decision-making, namely popular referenda.
In Part I the author was concerned with modeling the monthly logarithmicnCHF/USD exchange rate, ''s''. He rejected a model proposed by B.T.nMcCallum. Searching for a more appropriate framework a story by P. DenGrauwe was introduced, bringing complex cognitive processes and socialnpractices into the picture.nThis paper treats again P. De Grauwe's story, supplements it and embedds itninto a broader setting showing its links to a subtle concept of agents'nrationality. We derive a testable implication of this approach. Althoughnthe test result is negative, it will be helpful for the misspecificationnanalysis of B.T. McCallum's model (applied to ''s''), which will finally benpresented in Part III of this paper.
This study reports data from a field experiment that was nconducted to investigate the relevance of gift-exchange for charitable ngiving. Roughly 10,000 solicitation letters were sent to potential donors nin the experiment. One third of the letters contained no gift, one third ncontained a small gift and one third contained a large gift. Whether a npotential donor received a letter with or without a gift was randomly ndetermined. We observe strong and systematic effects from including gifts. nCompared to the no gift condition, the relative frequency of donations nincreased by 17 percent if a small gift was included and by 75 percent for na large gift. Consequently, including gifts was highly profitable for the ncharitable organization. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, nit shows that reciprocity is an important motive for charitable giving, in naddition to the warm-glow motive. Second, the paper confirms the economic nrelevance of reciprocity by using field data. This extends the current body nof research on reciprocity, which is almost exclusively confined to nlaboratory studies.
"A crucial aspect of constitutional design is the provision of rules on how anconstitution is to be amended. If procedures for constitutional amendment are very restrictive,nchanges will take place outside the constitution. These changes are likely to be against thencitizens’ interests and their ability to influence the political process. We argue that thendevelopment of the constitution must be based on the rule of law. We propose directndemocratic rights that allow citizens to participate in the amendment process. The directndemocratic process of institutional change is theoretically and empirically analyzed. Annumber of counter arguments and issues for a gradual introduction are discussed."
Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are advanced to bolster the claim that direct political participation via referenda and initiatives constitutes an advanced form of democracy with beneficial effects on Transition Countries.nDirect democracy raises trust and honesty and improves social outcomes. Per capita incomes and subjective well-being are raised.nStandard arguments against direct democracy (citizens' incompetence and lacking interest, danger of manipulation and emotionality, hindering progress and destroying civil rights, high cost) are rejected.nElements of direct democracy can be introduced at the national and local levels, and then proceeding further. Citizens should have the right to govern this process.n
