When people decide about saving and consumption across the various periods of their life time they take into account their life expectancy when comparing present and future needs and resources for satisfying them. The experimental design, applied at two sites (Humboldt-University at Berlin and...

Individuals frequently transfer commodities without an explicit contract or an implicit enforcement mechanism. We design an experiment to study whether such commodity transfers can be viewed as investments based on trust and reciprocity, or whether they rather resemble presents with...

This paper is the attempt to summarize the state of art in additive and generalized additive models (GAM). The emphasis is on approaches and numerical procedures which have emerged since the monograph of Hastie and Tibshirani (1990) although reconsidering certain aspects of their work. Apart...

A procedure for testing equality across nonparametric regressions is proposed. The procedure allows for any dimension of the explanatory variables and for any number of subsamples. We consider the case of random explanatory variables and allow the designs of the regressors and the number of...

We develop inference tools in a semiparametric regression model with missing response data. A semiparametric regression imputation estimator and an empirical likelihood based one for the mean of the response variable are defined. Both the estimators are proved to be asymptotically normal, with...

For the Euro 2000 Soccer Championships an experimental asset market was condueted, with traders buying and selling contracts on the winners of individual matches. Market-generated probabilities are compared to professional bet quotas, and factors that are responsible for the quality of the...

This article investigates whether decision makers intuitively optimize close to the normative prediction in entrepreneurial decision situations where their time must be allocated between a wage job and a newly formed venture. We offer an analytical model based on maximizing expected utility, and...

On the basis of a real high stakes insurance experiment with small probabilities of losses, we demonstrate that concern is a more important driver of WTP for insurance than subjective probability estimates when there is ambiguity surrounding the estimate. Concern is still important when...

Additive modelling has been widely used in nonparametric regression to circumvent the "curse of dimensionality", by reducing the problem of estimating a multivariate regression function to the estimation of its univariate components. Estimation of these univariate functions, however, can suffer...

Additive modelling is known to be useful for multivariate nonparametric regression as it reduces the complexity of problem to the level of univariate regression. This usefulness could be compromised if the data set was contaminated by outliers whose detection and removal are particularly...