How can economic theory explain the reasons why consumers adopt innovations? Using the example of innovations in washing machines two approaches are compared. The first focuses in the manner of household production theory on changes in constraints without specifying preferences, leading to the...

Using Gretl, I apply ARMA, Vector ARMA, VAR, state-space model with a Kalman filter, transfer-function and intervention models, unit root tests, cointegration test, volatility models (ARCH, GARCH, ARCH-M, GARCH-M, Taylor-Schwert GARCH, GJR, TARCH, NARCH, APARCH, EGARCH) to analyze quarterly time...

The paper lists salient characteristics of the certainty theory of consumer choice and discusses the import of prominent empirical analyses of the theory. All of them reject the theory's empirical relevance which suggests that the theory is unfit to analyze consumer choice in an uncertain world....

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of ?social preferences?. We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

In this paper, we examine students' attitudes towards various allocation mechanisms for a scarce resource. For this purpose, we have run a survey among officers of the German military who are enrolled in different courses of study (such as economics) at the University of the German Federal Armed...

Economists praise the efficiency of the price mechanism in allocating scarce resources. Others, however, often reject it as unfair. In this study, we investigate the extent to which economists also differ from non-economists in how they value the fairness of the price system, and examine how...

Departures from "economic man" behavior in many games in which fairness is a salient characteristic are now well documented in the experimental economics literature. These data have inspired development of models of social preferences that assume agents have preferences for equity and efficiency...

This paper investigates how different dimensions of social capital and institutional quality are related to innovation activity and its utilisation. For reasons of data availability, previous studies have included mainly patenting data. This study complements the previous studies by analysing...

Consumer demand systems are estimated based on household expenditure micro-data and price variabilities (tapped over quarters and regions) of a developing Pacific island country. More purposefully, ‘hierarchically ordered’ modifications of parameter variations across differing demographic...