Exchange between anonymous actors in Internet auctions corresponds to a one-shot prisoner's dilemma-like situation. Therefore, in any given auction the risk is high that seller and buyer will cheat and, as a consequence, that the market will collapse. However, mutual cooperation can be attained...

Gaining valid answers to so-called sensitive questions is an age-old problem in survey research. Various techniques have been developed to guarantee anonymity and minimize the respondent's feelings of jeopardy. Two such techniques are the randomized response technique (RRT) and the unmatched...

The counterfactual decomposition technique popularized by Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973) is widely used to study mean outcome differences between groups. For example, the technique is often used to analyze wage gaps by sex or race. The present paper summarizes the technique and addresses a...

A new Stata command called -mgof- is introduced. The command is used to compute distributional tests for discrete (categorical, multinomial) variables. Apart from classic large sample $\chi^2$-approximation tests based on Pearson's $X^2$, the likelihood ratio, or any other statistic from the...

Studies mainly from the United States provide evidence that children of divorced parents face a higher risk of divorce in their own marriages. We estimate and analyze the effects of divorce transmission using comparative individual data from the United Nations for 13 eastern and western European...

In this paper we explore how individual personality characteristics influence online social networking behavior. We use data from an online survey with 1560 respondents from a major Swiss technical university and their corresponding online profiles and friendship networks on a popular Social...

In einem "sensitive topic survey" mit Studierenden der Universität Mainz (n=578) wurde die Brauchbarkeit von drei Techniken zur Erhebung heikler Sachverhalte untersucht: Wording/Framing-Techniken, die Technik des vertraulichen Kuverts und die Randomized-Response-Technik. Bezüglich...