Sacrifices to deities occur in nearly all known religions. In this paper, we report on our attempts to elicit this type of religious behaviour towards Theoi in the laboratory. The theory we test is that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals attempt to engage in a reciprocal contract with the...

Die Modellierung des CO2-Zertifikatepreisrisikos ist ein wichtiger Teilaspekt eines ganzheitlichen Managements von mit dem Emissionshandel verbundenen Unternehmensrisiken. Das Papier diskutiert ein Preisbildungsmodell, auf dessen Grundlage das Zertifikatepreisrisiko bewertet werden kann. Es wird...

Auf der Grundlage einer Stichprobe von 105 sächsischen Unternehmen wird deren Zukunftsfähigkeit mit Hilfe einer neuen Ratingtechnologie analysiert. Diese basiert - neben klassischen Analysewerkzeugen - auf einer direkten Einbeziehung von Risikogesichtspunkten und einer stochastischen...

This study analyzes the relationship of individual risk attitudes and occupational sorting with respect to occupational earnings risk. By using the German Mikrozensus, a precise measure for earnings risk is computed as the occupation-wide standard deviation of wages. Following the procedure...

In the context of principal-agent theory risk is largely seen as a source that causes inefficiencies and lowers incentives and accordingly is not in the principal’s interest. In this paper I compare two different designs of a collective tournament where output in a team is generated through a...

Climate risk is particularly burdensome to small-scale farmers in developing countries due to heavy dependence on natural resources, limited and erratic rainfall with high inter- and intra-annual variability, and other natural calamities. Numerous studies on climate change suggest that climate...

In this paper the class of Lower Partial Moments (LPMs) is used for measuring vulnerability as downside risk of household income in rural Cameroon. This class of established and coherent risk measures has been shown to meet a number of desirable properties. Among others, the LPMs fulfill the...

The so called flat-rate bias is a well documented phenomenon caused by consumers' desire to be insured against fluctuations in their billing amounts. This paper shows that expectation-based loss aversion provides a formal explanation for this bias. We solve for the optimal two-part tariff when...

The market for copyrights is characterised by a highly skewed distribution of profits: very few movies, books and songs generate huge profits, whereas the great bulk barely manages to recover production cost. At the moment when the owner of intellectual property grants a licence ('ex ante'),...

This paper uses the European Commission's Consumer Survey to assess whether inflation expectations have converged and whether inflation uncertainty has diminished following the introduction of the Euro in Europe. Consumers? responses to the survey suggest that inflation expectations depend more...