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,...

This paper reports the first experimental study of the serial and the average cost pricing mechanism under three different treatments: a complete information treatment and two treatments designed to simulate distributed systems like the Internet with extremely limited information, synchronous...

Economists invoke Mundell (1961) in arguing for the general policy of   a flexible exchange rate regime as a means of restoring equilibria   after shocks. But there is a discrepancy between the intent of the   general policy and attempts at its implementation as identified by  ...

This paper’s field evidence is: (1) many official sectors rapidly forget the damage of the 1982-85 exchange rate liquidity crisis and reverted to what caused that crisis, namely a closed economy clean floats perspective; and (2) the 2006-2008/9 exchange rate liquidity shock would have been more...

Our experiment investigates managers’ self-predictions of their subsequent performance and, based upon, their choice of a collaborator. Our results show that managers’ self-predictions are not biased anymore after they are informed about the performance of a reference group. In spite of...

Leniency clauses, offering cartelists legal immunity if they blow the whistle on each other, is a recent anti-trust innovation. The authorities wish to thwart cartels and promote competition. This effect is not evident, however; whistle-blowing may enforce trust and collusion by providing a tool...

This paper proposes a new explanation for the smile and skewness effects in implied volatilities. Starting from a microeconomic equilibrium approach, we develop a diffusion model for stock prices explicitly incorporating the technical demand induced by hedging strategies. This leads to a...

The basic model of financial economics is the Samuelson model of geometric Brownian motion because of the celebrated Black-Scholes formula for pricing the call option. The asset volatility is a linear function of the asset value and the model guarantees positive asset prices. We show that the...

Let X be a seminmartingale and Teta the space of all predictable X-integrable processes teta such that integral tetat dX is inthe space S square of semimartingales. We consider the problem of approximating a given random variable H element of L square (P) by the sum of a constant c and a...