In a contest players compete for winning a prize by effort and thereby increasing their probability of winning. Contestants, however, could also improve their own relative position by harming the other players. We experimentally analyze contests with heterogeneous agents who may individually...

In a contest players compete for winning a prize by effort and thereby increasing their probability of winning. Contestants, however, could also improve their own relative position by harming the other players. We experimentally analyze contests with heterogeneous agents who may individually...

Understanding how physicians respond to incentives from payment schemes is a central concern in health economics research. We introduce a controlled laboratory experiment to analyse the influence of incentives from fee-for-service and capitation payments on physicians’ supply of medical...

The public debt may hamper US GDP say studies that estimate debt tipping effects as if there were a single world currency. This means that such studies ignore the likely biggest cause of changes in growth rates, namely damage from exchange rate liquidity shocks because we do not live in the...

The paper re-expresses and complements arguments against the normative validity of expected utility theory in Robin Pope (1983, 1991a, 1991b, 1985, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2005,2006, 2007). The objections concern the neglect of the evolving stages of knowledge ahead (stages of what the future will...

This paper introduces a new theoretic entity, a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. Abstractions used in the evaluation stage of decision making typically involve nominalist heuristics that are incompatible with expected utility theory which excludes...

The prior paper in this sequel, Pope (2009) introduced the concept of a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. In this paper the concept is used to show three things in how scientists and practitioners analyse and evaluate to decide (conclude). First,...

The paper deals with bounded rationality understood in the tradition of H.A. Simon. Fundamental problems and theoretical issues are discussed. Special emphasis is put on aspiration adaptation theory. Further remarks concern basic models of decision behavior (like learning and expectation...