We propose a theory that explains why rational agents start to believe in a causal relationship between unrelated events. Agents send and collect messages through a communication network. If they are convinced of a relationship between two events, they send messages confirming their belief with...

This paper provides evidence that interbank markets are tiered rather than flat, in the sense that most banks do not lend to each other directly but through money center banks acting as intermediaries. We capture the concept of tiering by developing a core-periphery model, and devise a procedure...

This paper examines how delivery tariffs and private quality standards are determined in vertical relations that are subject to asymmetric information. We consider an infinitely repeated game where an upstream firm sells a product to a downstream firm. In each period, the firms negotiate a...

Die im Rahmen des vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) geförderten Projektes KompNet2011 - Erfolgsfaktoren regionaler Innovationsnetze - durchgeführte Befragung untersucht die Innovationskooperationen sowie Wissenstransferaktivitäten von schwerpunktmäßig kleinen und...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir die Rolle von Genossenschaftsbanken, Kreditbanken und Sparkassen bei der Vergabe langfristiger Kredite an junge, kleine Unternehmen. Dies geschieht am Beispiel von Krediten aus öffentlichen Förderprogrammen, die in Deutschland einen substantiellen Anteil aller...

It is a persistent phenomenon in many societies that a large proportion of alcohol consumption takes place in company of other people. While the phenomenon of social or public drinking is well discussed in disciplines as social psychology and anthropology, economists have paid little attention...

Cost-based pricing has dominated the regulatory regime of network industries - and first of all, the regulation of the infocommunications sector - in the European Union since the early 1990s. When privatization of network industries began in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), one of the main...

In this paper we consider and evaluate NGA architectures which meet the foreseeable future bandwidth demand and allow for highest bandwidth and quality for end-users and which no longer rely on copper cable elements. These are FTTH architectures only. From all available FTTH architectures we...

Based on a national representative survey conducted in 2009, this study shows that the decision-making within Farmer Professional Cooperatives (FPCs) in China is decentralized to individual farmers. However, there is a trend that the decision rights of farming are decomposed to marketing,...