We study a model where agents, located in a social network, decide whether to exert effort or not in experimenting with a new technology (or acquiring a new skill, innovating, etc.). We assume that agents have strong incentives to free ride on their neighbors' effort decisions. In the static...

Conflict among member states regarding the distribution of net financial burdens has been allowed to contaminate the entire design of the EU budget with very negative consequences in terms of equity, efficiency and transparency. To get around this problem and pave the way for a substantive...

This paper shows how a high level matrix programming language may be used to perform Monte Carlo simulation, bootstrapping, estimation by maximum likelihood and GMM, and kernel regression in parallel on symmetric multiprocessor computers or clusters of workstations. The implementation of...

In this paper a contest game with heterogeneous players is analyzed in which heterogeneity could be the consequence of past discrimination. Based on the normative perception of the heterogeneity there are two policy options to tackle this heterogeneity: either it is ignored and the contestants...

It is well-known that couples that look jointly for jobs in the same centralized labor market may cause instabilities. We demonstrate that for a natural preference domain for couples, namely the domain of responsive preferences, the existence of stable matchings can easily be established....

Strategy-proof social choice functions are characterized for societies where the space of alternatives is any full dimensional compact subset of a Euclidean space and all voters have generalized single-peaked preferences.

A key issue multicriteria evaluation in a fuzzy environment is how to compare fuzzy numbers. In this paper, the case of criterion scores in the form of L-R fuzzy numbers, i.e. the most general form of fuzzy numbers, will be considered.

We address the question of how a third-party payer (e.g. an insurer) decides what providers to contract with. Three different mechanisms are studied and their properties compared. A first mechanism consists in the third-party payer setting up a bargaining procedure with both providers jointly...

The stationary structure of the simple overlapping generations economies is used to try to extend to the case with extrinsic uncertainty the characterizations of their stationary equilibria by means of symmetrical multiple equilibria of a related exchange economy in which the representative...

An assesment aggregation rule is a mechanism which collapses several individual assessments ("quantitative opinions") into a unique ("collective") assessment. Individual i can manipulate assessment aggregation if the change in the aggregated assessmentdue to a change in i's assesment from x to...