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...

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...

Discriminant analysis for two data sets in IRd with probability densities f and g can be based on the estimation of the set G = {x : f(x) ≥ g(x)}. We consider applications where it is appropriate to assume that the region G has a smooth boundary. In particular, this assumption makes sense if...

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...

Motivated by a nonparametric GARCH model we consider nonparametric additive regression and autoregression models in the special case that the additive components are linked parametrically. We show that the parameter can be estimated with parametric rate and give the normal limit. Our procedure...

We introduce a new method for the estimation of discount functions, yield curves and forward curves from government issued coupon bonds. Our approach is non-parametric and does not assume particular functional form for the discount function although we do show how to impose various restrictions...