infonet-economy

In recent years it has become increasingly popular in the German speaking part of Europe to train individuals in so called 'social competences' or 'soft skills', thus presumably enabling both individuals and organizations to better relate with each other and thus 'function' more efficiently and effectively - at least this seems to be the inherent promise...

As the share of supplementary health insurance (SI) in health care finance is likely to grow, SI may become an increasingly attractive tool for risk-selection in basic health insurance (BI). In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework to assess the probability that insurers will use SI for favourable risk-selection in BI. We apply our framework to five countries in which risk-...

It has long been recognized that there is considerable heterogeneity in individual risk taking behavior but little is known about the distribution of risk taking types. We present a parsimonious characterization of risk taking behavior by estimating a finite mixture regression model for three different experimental data sets, two Swiss and one Chinese, over a large number of real...

Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in politics and in rational choice analyses of terrorism. However, there are two strategies that are superior to deterrence. The first one is to make terrorist attacks less devastating and less attractive to terrorists through decentralization. The second one is to raise the opportunity cost – rather than the material...

‘Doing gender' is a popular concept when studying gender, work and organisations and many studies in the field have used this concept. However what is actually meant by ‘doing gender' in different contexts is often quiet diverse. In this article the understanding of ‘doing gender' in empirical research on gender, work and organisations is critically interrogated. The...

We examined the distribution of benefits to partners in multipartner alliances by concentrating on dynamics of partner entry and involvement. Testing hypotheses in the Wi-Fi Alliance, we observed heterogeneity of benefits. In particular, the extent of organizational involvement in this alliance enhanced partners' reputation and market success with related product introductions...

A new decision theory is proposed to explain the violations of expected utility theory through the role of random errors. The main premise of the new theory is that individuals make random errors when they compute the expected utility of a risky lottery. When being distorted by error, the expected utility of a lottery should neither exceed the utility of the highest possible outcome...

The clean development mechanism (CDM) should foster sustainable development and greenhouse gas emission reductions. The design of the CDM and first experience suggest that it may not achieve these goals. Developing countries hosting CDM projects may lose cheap emission reduction possibilities for their own future use, and sustainable development and technology transfer may not take...

Elements of regulation inherent in most social health insurance systems are a uniform package of benefits and uniform cost sharing. Both elements risk to burden the population with a welfare loss if preferences differ. This suggests introducing more contracted choice; however, it is widely believed that this would not benefit the aged. This study examines the relationship between age...