Nations that have managed to become rich have had institutional features that supported incentives for value creation while ensuring that the ways insiders and special interest groups can extract monopoly rents are limited. Improved skills have been a central component of helping individuals and...

Is welfare economics still possible, when preferences are endogenously determined? The answer is yes, if and only if the hypothesis of adaptive preferences is correct. If preferences satisfy the conditions of continuity, non-satiation and regularity, then adaptive preferences imply that...

Commercial ceilings not only restrict broadcasters in their decisions about commercial broadcasting time, but also affect their differentiation of program content. This study examines the welfare effects of commercial ceilings in a two-sided free-to-air TV market, taking into account welfare...

Based on the acquiring-a-company game of Samuelson and Bazerman (1985), we theoretically and experimentally analyze the acquisition of a firm. Thereby we compare cases of symmetrically and asymmetrically informed buyers and sellers. This setting allows us to predict and test the effects of...

Economic models of climate policy (or policies to combat other environmental problems) typically neglect psychological adaptation to changing life circumstances. People may adapt or become more sensitive, to different degrees, to a deteriorated environment. The present paper addresses these...

This paper analyzes the implications of bilateral bargaining over wages and employment between a producer and a union representing a finite number of identical workers in a monetary macroeconomic model of the AS AD type with government activity. Wages and aggregate employment levels are set...

In many empirical Contingent Valuation studies one finds that household size, i. e. the number auf household members, is negatively correlated with stated household willingness to pay for the realization of environmental projects. This observation is rather puzzling because in larger households...

Living downtown has advantages because it allows for a convenient access to a variety of shopping and leisure activities as well as disadvantages due to the difficulties in finding a parking spot when parking capacity is scarce. We formally model the trade-off in a vibrant city district between...

This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...

The Winner s Curse (WC) is a non-equilibrium behavior in common-value auctions involving systematic and persistent overbidding that often results in significant losses. It is one of the most robust findings in laboratory experiments. We developed an auction mechanism with a payment rule that...