.... Strategic evaluations are interested in the overall relevance and coherence of EU interventions. They have a dual objective to provide accountability and promote learning. Most importantly, they seek to generate knowledge to help decision-makers to improve development policy, programming...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide verifiable policy-relevant information to a political decision-maker and to exert political pressure on her. We show that both lobbying instruments are interdependent. In our view information provision is a risky attempt to affect the...

Policymakers at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) publish macroeconomic forecasts since 1979. Some studies find that these forecasts do not contain useful information to predict these macroeconomic variables compared to other forecasts. In this paper, we examine the value of publishing...

Word-of-Mouth (WOM) is recognized as a powerful marketing instrument. Its importance as a communication mechanism has widely explored and established in influencing purchase decision in the consumer behaviour domain (e.g., Gilly et al. 1998; Herr et al. 1991; Wilson 1991). WOM was recognized as an...

The paper concerns a dynamic model of influence in which agents have to make a yes-no decision. Each agent has an initial opinion, which he may change during different phases of interaction, due to mutual influence among agents. The influence mechanism is assumed to be stochastic and to follow a...

We generalize a yes-no model of influence in a social network with a single step of mutual influence to a framework with iterated influence. Each agent makes an acceptance- rejection decision and has an inclination to say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Due to influence by others, an agent's...

Despite its important contributions to economic thought, namely in the field of spatial economics and economics of development, François Perroux, one of the most important French economists of the 20st century, remains today poorly appreciated and frequently unrecognized.This paper tends to...

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. It is based on the idea of a two-step flow of communication. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members of the society called...