In standard market theory demand and cost functions have to be known to compute optimal price or quantity responses. In case of risk or uncertainty the decisions depend on expectations, i.e. estimated parameters. Even in case of rational inference these expectations itself are uncertain, at...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiring a company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition of both, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higher prices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

Das Papier charakterisiert die spezifischen Eigenschaften des Gutes Software. Als Alternative zur Bereitstellung von Software über Märkte werden die Charakteristika der "freien" Open-Source-Softwareentwicklung dargestellt, bei der die Entwickler auf eine unmittelbare kommerzielle Verwertung...

In case of digital goods such like music, intellectual property rights are typically not exerted by the creators (artists) but by intermediaries. Their profits, and therefore also the income of the artists, are endangered by copyright infringements (piracy). It is well known from static welfare...

"Waste not want not" expresses our culture's aversion to waste. "I could have gotten the same thing for less" is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people's willingness to "pay" to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were looking for a...

Literature and practice reveal that most marketing related questionnaires measuring consumer preferences rely on some kind of conjoint analysis. Recent studies show the analytic hierarchy process to be suitable for this task, too. This paper gives a comparison of the approaches and the results...

An advisor is supposed to recommend a financial product in the best interest of her client. However, the best product for the client may not always be the product yielding the highest commission (paid by product providers) to the advisor. Do advisors nevertheless provide truthful advice? If not,...

A decision maker (DM) wishes to select a competent candidate to fill a position. However, since the wage and task of the position is predetermined, the DM cannot use contract as a screening device. This paper formulates the problem as a class of selection problem and derives the optimal...

The winner's curse is a well-known deviation from rational self-interest in decision-making under asymmetric information. Yet, most prominent explanations for the curse have experimentally been ruled out so far. In particular, the curse did neither seem to emanate from a lack of experience with...

Actual behaviour is influenced in important ways by moral emotions, for instance guilt or shame (see, among others, Tangney et al., 2007). Belief-dependant models of social preferences using the framework of psychological games aim to consider such emotions to explain other-regarding behaviour....