To explain the strategic dimension in pricing options, it will be helpful to go back to the heart of the idea behind the concept of an option: options open up the possibility to postpone current decisions to a future point of time. Because of this flexibility additional information and new...

This note examines the behavior of a competitive firm that faces joint price and inflation risk. Given that the price risk is negatively correlated with the inflation risk in the sense of expectation dependence, the firm optimally opts for an overhedge if the firm's coefficient of relative risk...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht ein Duopol bei unsicherer Nachfrage unter Risikoaversion. Die Produktion der gesamten Industrie fällt durch die Einführung von Nachfrageunsicherheit; der Marktpreis steigt wegen des schwächeren Wettbewerbs. Damit ist die Veränderung des Gewinns und des...

International and national investors are often exposed to real wealth risks, stemming from volatile asset prices and inflation uncertainty, making it difficult to stabilize consumption patterns. However, investors can enter futures markets to hedge against these risks. The paper develops a...

There is a huge literature on the effects of uncertainty on trade levels. One very strong result of that literature is that uncertainty should not matter, as long as well developed forward markets exist. The empirical implications of this result, however, are hard to find in the data. We model...

The "red herring" hypothesis contends that the high health care expenditure in old age is caused by proximity to death rather than calendar age. Dissenters point to longitudinal data and claim that health care expenditure age profiles tend to steepen over time. The present paper tests the...

A nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is performed on hospitals in the federal state of Saxony (Germany) and in Switzerland. This study is of interest from three points of view. First, contrary to most existing work, patient days are not treated as an output but as an input. Second,...