On a homogeneous oligopoly market informed sellers are fully aware of market demand whereas uninformed sellers only know the distribution. We first derive the market results when sellers are risk averse, similarly to Ponssard (1979) who assumed risk neutrality throughout. With the help of these...

The evolution of trustworthiness as a major aspect of business ethics depends crucially on whether it can be signaled. If this is impossible, only opportunistic traders will survive. Whereas previous studies have analysed detection agencies (Güth and Kliemt, 1994 and 1998) or have substituted...

Can a court system conceivably control opportunistic behavior if judges are selected from the same population as ordinary citizens and thus are no better than "the rest of us"? This paper provides a new and, as we claim, quite profound "rational choice" answer to that unsolved riddle. Adopting...

The theory of industrial organization has experienced an impressive boom by using the methods of (non-cooperative) game theory. The conclusions depend, however. crucially on subtle details of the market decision processes about which there exist no or little empirical information. Studies of...

In a complete financial market every contingent claim can be hedged perfectly. In an incomplete market it is possible to stay on the safe side by superhedging. But such strategies may require a large amount of initial capital. Here we study the question what an investor can do who is unwilling...

Rational bargaining behavior depends crucially on the rules of bargaining, especially on whether parties decide sequentially or independently. Whereas in ultimatum bargaining the proposer can exploit the responder, independent commitments result in more balanced payoffs. To limit the scope of...

Motivated by the Kyle-Back model of “insider trading”, we consider certain classes of linear transformations of two independent Brownian motions and study their canonical decomposition as semimartingales in their own filtration. In particular we characterize those transformations which...

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...

An investor faced with a contingent claim may eliminate risk by (super-)hedging in a financial market. As this is often quite expensive, we study partial hedges, which require less capital and reduce the risk. In a previous paper we determined quantile hedges which succeed with maximal...