A model of "satisficing" behavior in the repeated Prisoners Dilemma is studied. Each player has an aspiration at each date, and takes an action. [S]he switches from the action played in the previous period only if the achieved payoff fell below the aspiration level (with a probability that...

Traditional efficiency measures neglect bank risk and, even when risk is accounted for, do not differentiate between the portion subject to managerial control (¿internal¿) versus the portion that is exogenous and is part of a changing environment (¿external¿). This paper proposes a new...

Increased competition and the attempts of European banks to increase their presence in other markets may have affected the efficiency and credit risk. The first of this aspects is based on the incentive to the banks to reduce cost in order to gain in competitiveness. The second is associated to...

We experimentally investigate the effect of population viscosity (an increased probability to interact with others of one's type or group) on cooperation in a standard prisoner's dilemma environment. Subjects can repeatedly choose between two groups that differ in the defector gain in the...

The objective of this study is to analyze the macroeconomic performance of 16 Ibero- American countries over the period 1980- 199 1. Macroeconomic performance is defined as the ability of a country's macroeconomic managers to provide four welfare-enhancing economic services to their citizens: a...

In this paper we extend the efficiency cross-country comparisons to ten European countries in order to know how different or similar current banking performances are. We start with two types of comparisons. First of all, we evaluate the average technical efficiency of each country by means of a...

This paper studies implementation of cooperative payoffs in finitely repeated games when players implement their strategies by finite automata of big sizes. Specifically, we analyze how much we have to depart from fully rational behavior to achieve the Folk Theorem payoffs, i.e., which are the...

The main contribution of this paper is to present a new procedure to reach cooperation through pseudorandom schemes in the finitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game, when strategies are implemented by automata. The equilibrium path consists of a communication process followed by a coordinated...

We experimentally investigate the effect of imperfect separation of groups on group selection and cooperation in a standard prisoner¿s dilemma environment. Subjects can repeatedly choose between two groups, where in one of them an institutionalized norm fosters cooperation. The degree of...

In this paper we examine the performance of the target setting procedure employed by one of the largest savings banks in Spain, Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo, to evaluate the operating performance of its branch offices. We begin by evaluating the ability of the branch offices to meet the...