This paper investigates the impact of four key economic variables on an expert firm’s incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market: the level of competition, the expert firm’s financial situation, its competence, and its reputational concerns. We use and complement the...

This paper studies the problem of redistribution between individuals having different mortality rates. We use a continuous time model in which there are two types of individuals characterized by different survival probability paths. Individual preferences are represented by a generalized...

This paper estimates a US frontier residential aggregate energy demand function using panel data for 48 ‘states’ over the period 1995 to 2007 using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Utilizing an econometric energy demand model, the (in)efficiency of each state is modelled and it is argued...

Discrete choice experiments are increasingly being used to assess preferences for services provided by regulated utilities. A commonly observed tendency of customers to opt for the status quo option may signal unwillingness to trade-off changes in service levels with bills, questioning the...

Climate physics predicts that the intensity of natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change. One of the biggest challenges for economic modeling is the inherent uncertainty of climate events, which crucially affects consumption, investment, and abatement decisions. We...

We evaluate incentives for residential energy upgrades in Italy using data from an original survey of Italian homeowners. In this paper, attention is restricted to heating system replacements, and to the effect of monetary and non-monetary incentives on the propensity to replace the heating...

When markets are incomplete, social security can partially insure against idiosyncratic and aggregate risks. We incorporate both risks into an analytically tractable model with two overlapping generations and demonstrate that they interact over the life-cycle. The interactions appear even though...

In this paper, we present a new way to deal with initiatives, i.e. proposals that can be submitted to voting by the citizens of a democracy. We call it “Assessment Voting”. It takes place in two rounds. Before the conclusive voting, a given number of randomly-chosen voters casts its votes....

This paper investigates competition among financial intermediaries in a finite-trader version of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) economy under no aggregate uncertainty. The economy is populated by self-interested financial intermediaries that compete strategically over deposit contracts offered to...

We integrate individual power in groups into general equilibrium models with endogenous group formation. We distinguish between formal power (the say in group decisions) and real power (utility gain from being in groups). Their values will be determined as part of the equilibrium. We find that...