Empire-building by managers implies that they use a lower effective discount rate in making investment decisions. We use actual investment decisions to measure the gap between the manager’s effective discount rate and the market rate. Our empirical work is based on panel data for 193 Canadian...

This paper investigates empirically whether decision makers are forward looking in dynamic strategic interactions. In particular, we test whether decision makers in multi-stage tournaments take heterogeneity induced changes of continuation values and the ability of their immediate opponent into...

We investigate the impact of self-organized reputation versus certification by an independent institution on demand for online shops. Using data from a large Austrian price comparison site, we show that quality seals issued by a credible and independent institution increase demand more than...

A long tradition suggests a fundamental distinction between situations of risk, where true objective probabilities are known, and unmeasurable uncertainties where no such probabilities are given. This distinction can be captured in a Bayesian model where uncertainty is represented by the agent's...

This paper studies the impact of income inequality on the level of innovative activities in a model where innovations result in quality improvements. The market for quality goods is characterized by a natural oligopoly with three types of consumers - rich, middle class and poor. In general, we...

In this paper we consider the implications of relative consumption externalities in the Blanchard-Yaari overlapping generations framework. Unlike most of the macroeconomic literature that studies this question, the differences between agents, and, thus, in their relative position, persist in...

This paper aims at analyzing the implications of individuals' consumption jealousy on the dynamic structure of a two-sector model economy. We find that status-seeking substantially influences both, the long-term properties and the adjustment behavior of the model. Depending on the status motive,...