Analyzing scanner price data that cover 27 product categories over an eight-year period from a large Mid-western supermarket chain, we uncover a surprising regularity in the data—small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases. We find that this asymmetry holds for price...

This paper explores the growing involvement of new types of non- commodity-sector-related players in commodity futures markets. This includes a discussion on the role of managed funds, the impact of the use of commodity warrants, and the direct involvement of banks. The impact of this new form...

Uncertainty represented by volatilities in equity markets has been observed to be time-variable and lead output fluctuations. In the rational expectation framework, uncertainty with this nature needs exogenous variables with time-varying volatilities, but technology, tastes and fiscal and...

I study Cournot competition under incomplete information about demand while assuming that market price must be non-negative for all demand realizations. Although this assumption is very natural, it has only rarely been made in the earlier literature. Yet it has important economic consequences:...

Economic theory predicts that in a first-price auction with equal and observable valuations, bidders earn zero profits. Theory also predicts that if valuations are not common knowledge, then since it is weakly dominated to bid your valuation, bidders will bid less and earn positive profits....

This paper gives a concrete example of a nondictatorial, coalitionally strategyproof social choice function for countably infinite societies. The function is defined for those profiles such that for each alternative, the coalition that prefers it the most is gdescribable.h The gdescribableh...

This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing one of the most important intangible assets in a firm: the ability to predict profitable investment opportunities. This paper shows theoretically how to measure the accuracy of information used to predict opportunities, and estimates the...

A widely held belief in financial economics suggests that stock prices always adequately reflect all available information. Price movements away from fundamentals are assumed to occur only infrequently, if at all. „False“ prices are supposed to be corrected by the counter-actions of...

Risk exposure can be efficiently optimized in practical situations, using a new apporach to identification of investor's risk aversion.