Our purpose is to show how large difference of beliefs induced by fear of crashesis amenable to large and persistent price responses to contemporaneous shocks. Weconstruct a pure exchange economy populated by two agents who estimate strictlydifferent models regarding the fundamental. In...

We explore the pricing of variance risk by decomposing stocks' total variance into systematicand idiosyncratic return variances. While systematic variance risk exhibits a negative priceof risk, common shocks to the variances of idiosyncratic returns carry a large positive riskpremium. This...

This paper presents an equilibrium model in a pure exchange economywhen investors have three possible sources of heterogeneity. Investorsmay differ in their beliefs, in their level of risk aversion andin their time preference rate. We study the impact of investors heterogeneityon equilibrium...

Das Phänomen der Macht ist seit jeher ein Faszinosum. Es scheint im menschlichen Dasein allgegenwärtig zu sein, und es überrascht deshalb nicht, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema wohl so alt wie die Menschheit selbst ist. Allerdings erweist sich das Machtphänomen aus theoretischer...

The notion of choice inconsistency is widely spread in the literature on behavioraleconomics. Several approaches were used to account for the observation that peoplereverse their choices over time. This paper aims to explain the formation of resolutionsregarded as internal self-binding devices....

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences.While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologistsrather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suer from distinctweaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in themeasurement of...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation forparticipation in religion and ritual. But if the signal’s cost is too small, freeriders willsend the signal and behave selfishly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitivelycostly. If the average level of...

This paper provides a new way to identify conditional cooperationin a real-time version of the standard voluntary contribution mechanism. Ourapproach avoids most drawbacks of the traditional procedures because it relieson endogenous cycle lengths, which are defined by the number of contributors...

The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departuresfrom pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others’well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type ofbehavior persists when risk comes into...