The paper analyzes the introduction of the long-term care insurance in Germany and provides an overview of some of the main arguments. It focuses on economic aspects of the new scheme, namely its impact on efficiency, distribution and employment as well as government budgets.

The paper elaborates the productivity paradox of information technology in order to find an answer to the question of why, contrary to expectations, the correlation between expenditures in information technology and economic growth is not ambiguous. To formulate an answer, the paper focuses on...

Multi-choice games and fuzzy games both deal with the situations where the players have more than two participants levels. Two values have been proposed for the multi-choice games: Hsiao-Raghavan (1993) and Nouweland et al. (1995). The former one depends on an arbitrarily given weight, and Hsia...

In this paper a theoretical framework is provided to link firm efficiency to product market competition. In particular x-efficienct is shown to arise to the extent unions directly affect the level of employment. A positive relationship is established between social efficiency and x-efficiency,...

The discussion of power measures and fairness concepts follows two isolated strings of thought that have rather different traditions. This paepr argues that it is exactly this restriction that confuses the discussion. By making use of the theory of power indices and Binmore's theory of justice,...

Social conventions and norms can be modeled as equilibria of coordination games. it is argued that the critical mass necessary for a society to move from one convention, that is from one equilibrium, to another changes correspondingly with changes in the population structure due to generation...