We consider the question whether top tennis players in a top tournament (Wimbledon) employ an optimal (efficient) service strategy.We show that top players do not, in general, follow an optimal strategy, and we provide a lower bound of the inefficiency.The inefficiency regarding winning a point...

Abstract: In specifying a regression equation, we need to determine which regressors to include, but also how these regressors are measured. This gives rise to two levels of uncertainty: concepts (level 1) and measurements within each concept (level 2). In this paper we propose a hierarchical...

In this paper we shall be interested in two questions on extremes relating to world records in athletics.The first question is: what is the ultimate world record in a specific athletics event (such as the 100m for men or the high jump for women), given today's state of the art?Our second...

In the context of extreme climate change, we ask how to conduct expected utility analysis in the presence of catastrophic risks. Economists typically model decision making under risk and uncertainty by expected util- ity with constant relative risk aversion (power utility); statisticians typi-...

We take a fresh look at Theil's BLUS residuals and ask why they have gone out of fashion.All our simulation experiments indicate that tests based on BLUS residuals have higher power than those based on the more popular recursive residuals, even in those cases (structural breaks) where intuition...

We introduce an accurate, easily implementable, and fast algorithm to compute optimal decisions in discrete-time long-horizon welfaremaximizing problems. The algorithm is useful when interest is only in the decisions up to period T, where T is small. It relies on a flexible parametrization of...

Bayesian model averaging attempts to combine parameter estimation and model uncertainty in one coherent framework. The choice of prior is then critical. Within an explicit framework of ignorance we define a ‘suitable’ prior as one which leads to a continuous and suitable analog to the...

Data in econometrics are, as a rule, non-experimental and hence we have to use the same data set to select the model and also to estimate the parameters in the selected model.In standard applied econometrics practice, however, one reports zero bias and some variance of the (pretest) estimators...