Ranking have become increasingly popular on markets for study programs, restaurants, wines, cars, etc. This paper analyses the welfare implication of such rankings. Consumers have to make a choice between two goods of unknown quality with exogenous presence or absence of an informative ranking....

Various approaches used in Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) to model endogenously determined interactions between agents are discussed. This concerns models in which agents not only (learn how to) play some (market or other) game, but also (learn to) decide with whom to do that (or not).

Economies are complicated systems encompassing micro behaviors, interaction patterns, and global regularities. Whether partial or general in scope, studies of economic systems must consider how to handle difficult real-world aspects such as asymmetric information, imperfect competition,...

We propose a theory of monetary policy and macroprudential interventions in financial markets. We focus on economies with nominal rigidities in goods and labor markets and subject to constraints on monetary policy, such as the zero lower bound or fixed exchange rates. We identify an aggregate...

Flexible inflation targeting cannot be rationalised using conventional welfare economic criteria, except in a single, practically uninteresting special case. New-Keynesian DSGE models imply that optimal monetary policy implements the Bailey-Friedman Optimal Quantity of Money rule and that actual...

This paper is an empirical investigation into the Norwegian Interbank Offered Rate (NIBOR) during 2007–11. It is demonstrated that an informal rule change to the benchmark fixing mechanism, instigated by the NIBOR panel banks, not only increased the susceptibility of the benchmark to...

Under reduced-form learning, agents are endowed with an aggregate model, and rational expectations are then replaced with subjective expectations. This paper demonstrates that the reduced-form learning approach may be arbitrary in that a particular representation of aggregate dynamics has...

This paper examines the potential welfare effects of storage under different market structures. This includes combinations of perfectly competitive and strategic generation and storage sectors, and standalone and generator-owned storage. We demonstrate that if the generation sector is perfectly...

After some decades of relative oblivion, the interest in the optimality properties of monopolistic competition has recently re-emerged due to the availability of an appropriate and parsimonious framework to deal with firm heterogeneity. Within this framework we show that non-separable utility,...

The widespread wellbeing and the fulfillment for one’s own standard of living play a role more and more relevant to define consumer’s behavior in particular with regard to food consumption. Recently John Rawls, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum overcoming conventional wellbeing theory...