Real-world contests are often "unfair" in the sense that outperforming all rivals may not be enough to be the winner, because some contestants are favored by the allocation rule, while others are handicapped. Examples of such contests can be inter alia found in the area of litigation and...

This paper uses a natural experiment approach to identify the effects of an exogenous change in future pension benefits on workers'' training participation. We use unique matched survey and administrative data for male employees in the Dutch public sector who were born in 1949 or 1950. Only the...

Co-determination refers to a set of rules and institutions which form an interlocking system and as such provide the unique structure of German corporate governance. This essay deals with the reasons responsible for bringing the structure about. In particular, the decision making process leading...

The editors of Kyklos have asked the question: Is there a European economics? This short essay tries to give an answer by first trying to provide a framework for a sensible answer in economics, and then following suit by illustrating how in the context of this frame-work, the answer can be...

In this paper we recognize that reforms of the welfare state can be necessary from an economic point of view. We stress, however, that these reforms also have important social and political dimensions. The social dimensions are conceptualised by using Hofstede''s cultural characteristics. The...

We consider a stochastic scheduling problem in which there is uncertainty about parame-ters of the probability distribution of the processing times. We restrict ourselves to the setting in which there are two different classes of jobs. The processing times of the jobs are assumed to be...

It is well--known that a transferable utility game has a non-empty core if and only if it is balanced. In the class of non-transferable utility games balancedness or the more general pi-balancedness due to Billera (1970) is a sufficient, but not a necessary condition for the core to be...

Increasing interest has recently been shown in analyzing the worst-case behavior of local search algorithms. In particular, the quality of local optima and the time needed to find the local optima by the simplest form of local search has been studied. This paper deals with worst-case performance...

An example shows that for sophisticated consumers with changing preferences it can be perfectly rational not to seize arbitrage opportunities in markets without frictions.

We discuss the two latest enlargements of the EU. While the 1995 entrants are by now fully integrated, the 2004 entrants will ``enjoy'''' a secondary status for a number of years. We attribute this difference to the fact that unlike the former EFTA members joining in 1995, the 2004 entrants...