Despite the formal rigour that attends social and economic measurement, the substantive meaning of particular measures could be compromised in the absence of a clear and coherent conceptualization of the phenomenon being measured. A case in point is afforded by the status of a focus axiom in the...

This paper addresses the poor economic performance of Eastern Europe in the 1990s and the future development potential of the region in the light of the theories of economic growth and human capital and their empirical tests. It concludes that Eastern Europe is likely to have fallen into a...

This paper analyses the German training system from the point of view of regional policy. The problems and prospects of the German system of first and further vocational training are addressed followed by an overview over macro and micro approaches to an empirical assessment of the regional...

This paper is concerned with the axiomatic foundation of the revealed preference theory. Many well-known results in literature rest upon the ability to choose over budget sets that contains only 2 or 3 elements, the situations which are not observable in real life. In order to give a more...

In this paper the authors assess the importance of sample type in the estimation of risk preferences. The authors elicit and compare risk preferences from student subjects and subjects drawn from the general population, using the multiple price list method devised by Holt and Laury (Risk...

Why do we love stories? That this is not an idle question is shown by the fact that we spend an enormous amount of time in our lives following stories: telling and listening to them; reading them; watching them on television or in films or on stage. Despite their recurrent similarity and even...

The study tests the cardinal utility maximization hypothesis by an experimental procedure in a framework of utility scaling approach following the psychophysical-econometric paradigm, conceived in He (Psychophysical Interpretation for Utility Measures, 2011). It reveals (i) the utility...

Arguments about the appropriate discount rate often start by assuming a Utilitarian social welfare function with isoelastic utility, in which the consumption discount rate is a function of the (constant) elasticity of marginal utility along with the (much discussed) utility discount rate. In...

We ask why, in many circumstances and many environments, decision-makers choose to act on a time-regular basis (e.g. adjust every six weeks) or on a stateregular basis (e.g. set prices ending in a 9), even though such an approach appears suboptimal. The paper attributes regular behaviour to...

The paper explores utility measures by combining experiments with mathematical derivations in psychophysics paradigm. The analysis on ultimatum game experiment reveals an evidence for utility threshold and thus supports Bernoulli's utility logarithmic law. Both experimental results and...