Governments may draft contracts with market agents for allocating subsidies and pursuing specific policy goals. Contract enforcement via binding commitments is difficult, however, when exogenous (environmental) and endogenous (behavioural) risks interact. Analyzing the old debt compromise in...

The Central East European economies are competing for international investment capital, especially for FDI in order to support transformation. The paper explores how the Siemens AG, one of the world's largest MNCs, allocates investments towards and within Central East Europe and how they fit...

The efficiency of the Pigouvian tax suggests that price-based regulation is the proper benchmark for efficient regulation. However, results due to Carlton and Loury (1980, 1986) question this; when harm depends on scale effects a pure Pigou tax is inefficient regulation in the long run. In this...

Some path-breaking work on mergers takes efficiency gains for granted, or assumes that firms have perfect knowledge when taking merger decisions. In practice, firms and competition authorities cannot know exact future efficiency gains, prior to merger consummation. This paper analyzes horizontal...

Analyzing a large weekly retail transaction price dataset, we uncover a surprising regularity— small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases for price changes of up to about 10 cents, while there is no such asymmetry for larger price changes. The asymmetry holds for...

Markov perfection has become the usual solution concept to determine the non-cooperative equilibrium in a dynamic game. However, Markov perfection is a stronger solution concept than subgame perfection: Markov perfection rules out any cooperation in a repeated prisoners' dilemma game because the...

Reichen die auf dem G-20-Gipfel beschlossenen Maßnahmen aus, die Finanzmärkte zu regulieren und die Wahrscheinlichkeit zukünftiger Krisen zu senken? Für Rolf J. Langhammer, Institut für Weltwirtschaft, Kiel, dienten die Beschlüsse des G-20-Gipfels der Krisenüberwindung und dem Versuch,...

In previous models of (cumulative) prospect theory reference-dependence of preferences is imposed beforehand and the location of the reference point is exogenously determined. This paper provides an axiomatization of a new specification of cumulative prospect theory, termed endogenous prospect...

In this paper, we consider a non-cooperative and symmetric three-stage game model composed by two regulator-firm hierarchies. By means of adequate emission taxes, original and absorptive research and development (R&D) subsidies we prove that regulators can reach the non-cooperative social...

The relationship between a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur is modeled to investigate the impact of public subsidies on venture capital investments in start-up enterprises. In this model, the venture capitalist only finances start-up enterprises if he has sufficient expertise to make...