Competition and forecasts for Nobel prize awards

The evolution of Nobel prize awards is studied as a learning/growing process. A simple logistic function describes the data well and accounts for the competition, be it between individuals or between nations. The American niche appears to be 64% exhausted by 1987, implying a diminishing expected rate of laureates in the future. Europeans have been losing ground continuously from the beginning while the remaining world has recently received more awards. Projections to the year 2000 and beyond are given. Correlations with age support the Darwinian nature of the competition for Nobel prizes. Awards to women show peaks coincidental with outbursts of feminism.     

Inaccurate forecasts of the logistic growth model for Nobel Prizes

Modis [Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change 34 (1988) 95] reports that a logistic growth (LG) model of the number of U.S. Nobel Prize recipients provides an excellent fit for the period 1901-1987. This model forecasts that approximately 235 Americans will receive a Nobel Prize by year-end 2002 and that a total of 283 Americans will eventually receive a Nobel Prize. We use recent data (1901-2002) on prize recipients to provide a revised test of this model. The results of extensive holdout forecasting and nonlinear least-squares fits to the data provide convincing evidence that the LG model systematically underpredicts the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans. For instance, the cumulative number of American recipients as of year-end 2002 is 270, significantly larger than the LG forecast of 235. We argue that other approaches to forecasting the number of future Nobel awards should be considered.     

F. A. Hayek’s influence on Nobel Prize winners

F.A. Hayek’s broad research program has led some to conclude that his impact on economics has been minimal. This citation study examines the frequency of Nobel laureates cited by other laureates in the official Prize Lectures to understand how elite economists influence other elite economists. It finds that Hayek is the second most frequently mentioned laureate in the Prize Lectures, and he has the second most publication citations of the laureates. Hayek’s influence on the top tier of economists is substantial.

Technological Forecasting at the Stock Market

Under the assumption that competition (Darwinian in nature) reigns in the stock market, we analyze the behavior of company stocks as if they were species competing for investors' resources. The approach requires the study of dollar values and share volumes, daily exchanged in the stock market, via logistic growth functions. These two variables, in contrast to prices, obey the law of natural growth in competition, which like every natural law, is endowed with predictability. A number of unexpected insights about the stock market emerge. The forecasts indicate that whereas there is no looming crash in the near future, no significant growth should be expected either. The DJIA is to hover around 9500 depicting large erratic excursions above and below this level for a few years. The use of Volterra-Lotka equations demonstrates that the 1987 crash altered the stock-bond interaction from a symbiotic to a predator-prey relationship with stocks acting as predators. This research work has lead to the publication of the book An S-Shaped Trail to Wall Street by T. Modis, (Growth Dynamics, Geneva, 1999).     

Memorability of Nobel Prize laureates in economics

In this article, a measure for the Relative Memorability of Nobel Prize winners is proposed, based on an exponential forgetting curve. The intention is to provide a measure that captures the fading nature of memories with respect to individual Nobel Prize winners in the cultural collective memory. For fame and achievement of Nobel Prize laureates, measurement methods are already developed. However, from a cultural viewpoint, the question is how well these persons are remembered. Applying the concept of memorability, as defined in this article, to Nobel laureates in Economics, Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz turn out to be the top-three economists in the collective memory. Moreover, the ranking of economists according the collective memory, their fame and their achievement produce quite different results.     

A Nobel Prize for the Empirical Analysis of Asset Prices

Abstract

The 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded to Eugene Fama, Robert Shiller, and Lars Peter Hansen for their empirical analysis of asset prices. The paper reviews critically the work of the three economists and highlights the differing conclusions that the three researchers reached on the relatively narrow question of the rationality of individual investors. The paper argues that there is a time inconsistency in the idea that markets reveal information about the future and concludes that, despite the sophistication of their statistical analysis, the laureates have been unable to demonstrate how a sophisticated financial economy can produce their empirical results.     

Climate Change,Innovation, and Economic Growth: The Contributions of William Nordhaus and Paul Romer

ABSTRACT

William Nordhaus and Paul Romer shared the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work on long-run macroeconomic analysis. Nordhaus adapted the neoclassical growth model to study climate change, while Romer developed a model of innovation-based growth. The authors provide two distinct explanations of what drives growth, and employ contrasting methodologies for interpreting the results of their mathematical models. Macroeconomic policy in general, and climate policy in particular, would benefit from better integrating the theory and methods of these two laureates.     

Banks and financial crises: contributions of Ben Bernanke,Douglas Diamond,and Philip Dybvig*

The 2022 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises”. This article surveys the contributions of the three laureates and discusses how their insights have changed the way that academics and policymakers understand banks and their roles in financial crises.     

Analysis of the Lotka-Volterra competition equations as a technological substitution model

This paper provides insight into the dynamics of the Lotka-Volterra competition (LVC) equations, a much used competition model, and compares the dynamics of LVC competitive substitution to that of several well-known substitution models. The behavior of the LVC equations is analyzed for the special case of a dominant competitor at equilibrium being replaced after the introduction of a small population of an invading competitor with a competitive advantage. Expressions are derived that describe the growth of the invading competitor and that growth is shown to be of four classes: left asymmetric, logistic, right asymmetric with 1−ε₂ asymptote and right asymmetric with γ asymptote. It is shown that the LVC model reverts to logistic substitution in a market of fixed size, a result with important implications. The LVC equations are fitted to the Gompertz, Bass, Non-Symmetrical Responding Logistic (NSRL) and Sharif-Kabir substitution models and compared using a novel graphical technique. The LVC equations can reasonably mimic the full range of curve shapes exhibited by each of these models.     

Another look at the identical tastes hypothesis on the analysis of cross-country alcohol data

A number of studies have appeared in the area of cross-country consumption comparisons, where a common system of demand equations is used to model the consumption patterns of all countries. Under this approach, tastes are taken to be the same internationally. Such an assumption of identical tastes was forcibly advocated by the dual Nobel laureates, Stigler and Becker, who argued that tastes neither change capriciously nor differ importantly between people. In this paper, we use the system-wide approach to demand analysis to analyse the alcohol consumption patterns of drinkers from 10 high-income industrialised countries and verify Stigler and Becker’s (Rev Econ Statist 59:113–118, 1977) hypothesis by testing whether pooling the data across countries is acceptable. We also present the implied demand elasticities for beer, wine and spirits for the 10 countries and discuss the use of these elasticities in policy-related applications.     

Empirical Asset Pricing: Eugene Fama,Lars Peter Hansen,and Robert Shiller

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2013 was awarded to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller for their contributions to the empirical study of asset pricing. Some observers have found it hard to understand the common elements of the laureates' research, preferring to highlight areas of disagreement among them. In this paper, I argue that empirical asset pricing is a coherent enterprise, which owes much to the laureates' influential contributions, and that important themes in the literature can best be understood by considering the laureates in pairs. Specifically, after summarizing modern asset‐pricing theory using the stochastic discount factor as an organizing framework, I discuss the following: the joint hypothesis problem in tests of market efficiency, which is as much an opportunity as a problem (Fama and Hansen); patterns of short‐ and long‐term predictability in asset returns (Fama and Shiller); and models of deviations from rational expectations (Hansen and Shiller). I conclude by reviewing the ways in which the laureates have already influenced the practice of finance, and how they might influence future innovations.     

Competition policy vs. industrial policy as a growth strategy

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that competition policy, rather than industrial policy, generated the rapid economic growth in post-war Japan. It also reveals that Japan’s growth rate was lowered from the mid-1970s due to newly introduced industrial policies and paucity of further competition policy. The current Abe government recognises the need for competition policies in Japan to recover from the low-growth period. The paper describes the types of competition policy carried out under Abenomics, especially in National Strategic Special Zones.Abbreviations: METI: Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry NSSZ: National Strategic Special Zones     

Austrian themes,data, and sports economics

This paper uses data from Major League Baseball and themes from Moneyball by Michael Lewis to empirically illustrate Kirznerian entrepreneurship. While Kirzner envisioned competition in markets for profit, the sports economics literature shows that sporting competition has things in common with market competition. This is important because a strength of sports economics, namely, the abundant data, can help overcome a perceived weakness of Austrian economics, namely, the lack of empirical content. This paper describes and empirically confirms how certain front office decision makers of the Oakland Athletics were alert to opportunities that were being overlooked by other baseball executives.

On the extraordinary scholarly life and times of Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock, who passed away at the age of 92 on November 3, 2014, ranks justly near the top of the list of the “founding fathers” of the public choice research program. Most widely known in the academy as coauthor of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962), Professor Tullock was not named, unfairly in our joint opinion, as co-recipient of James Buchanan’s 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. A good case nevertheless can be made that Gordon earned Nobel laurels on his own account for groundbreaking contributions to the literatures on, among other topics of scholarly study, rent seeking, autocracy, bureaucracy, war and revolution, law and economics and bio-economics. This essay celebrates Gordon Tullock’s major influences on the field of public choice, including his launching of Public Choice, the journal for which both of us have served as editors, and his impacts on scholars working at the many and obviously fruitful intersections of economics and political science.     

Competition format,championship uncertainty and stadium attendance in European football – a small league perspective

To increase the number of regular season games, small football leagues are often organized as quadruple round robin tournaments with teams playing each other four times. Theoretically, however, the more games played, the less uncertain is the championship race, reducing fan interest in the league. This article uses data from Austria and Switzerland to study the relationship between competition format, championship uncertainty and attendance demand empirically. Results suggest that a team still in contention to win the championship positively affects attendance, while it is not the specificity of the competition format that per se contributes to less championship uncertainty.     

The progressivity of equalization payments in federations

We investigate the conditions under which an inequality averse and additively separable welfarist central government would choose to set up a progressive equalization payments scheme in a federation with local public goods. A progressive equalization payments scheme is a list of per capita net (possibly negative) subsidies – one such net subsidy for every jurisdiction – that are decreasing with respect to jurisdictions per capita wealth. We examine this question in a setting where the case for progressivity is a priori the strongest, namely: all citizens have the same utility function, inhabitants of a given jurisdiction have the same wealth and are not able to move across jurisdictions and there is no cross-jurisdiction competition in the setting of tax rates. We show that the central government favors a progressive equalization payments scheme for all distributions of wealth and population sizes if and only if its objective function is additively separable between each jurisdiction's per capita wealth and number of inhabitants. When interpreted for a mean of order r social welfare function, and assuming the absence of congestion in the local public good, this condition is shown to be equivalent to the requirement that the individual indirect utility function be additively separable between wealth public good price and be raised at the power 1/r before its agregation by means of the mean-of-order r social welfare function. Some implications of this restriction to the case where the individual's direct utility function is additively separable are also derived.     

IS model: A general model of forecasting and its applications in science and the economy

Expanding the work of Marchetti and Modis on Lotka-Volterra competition systems, a general model of Interaction Systems (IS) is introduced to describe the dynamics of multiple member interactions among different populations concerning not only biological systems but other types of systems as well. The new IS model provides us with a general framework of analysis and forecasting, where all parameters, variables, and interactions have real meaning, by using basic knowledge of each system.The proposed model can be applied to many different fields covering economic, business, social, physical, and other phenomena giving us both numerical estimates and qualitative insights of the system's dynamics. This is illustrated in two case studies. In the first case, the IS model is applied to elementary chemical reactions in order to quantify the reactions' kinetics. The result is the well known rate law of chemical reactions kinetics thus providing evidence of the proposed model's validity. In the second case, the IS model is applied to the global economy. The resulting model is tested against real global GDP data. The new IS model gave reliable estimates and proved to be considerably more accurate as compared to a similar forecast of global GDP based on the logistic growth model. Furthermore, the new model presented a basic framework of understanding the nature of major economic shifts, including the recent global recession of 2009, by studying the dynamic relationship between demand and supply.     

Shopping hours and price competition

This paper develops an argument why retail prices may rise in response to the deregulation of opening hours. We make this point in a model of imperfect duopolistic competition. In a deregulated market retailers view the choice of opening hours as a means to increase the degree of perceived product differentiation thus relaxing price competition. If the consumers’ preference intensity for time is sufficiently high the equilibrium configuration has asymmetric shopping hours where one retailer stays open for longer than the other. Both retailers charge higher prices than under regulation, and both are strictly better off.     

The ghost of extinction: Preservation values and minimum viable population in wildlife models

The inclusion of a minimum viable population in bioeconomic modeling creates at least two complications that are not resolved by using a modified logistic growth function. The first complication can be dealt with by choosing a different depensational growth function. The second complication relates to the inclusion of the in situ benefits of wildlife into the analysis. Knowledge about the magnitude of the in situ benefits provides no guide for policy about conservation management. Simply knowing that people are willing to pay a large amount each year to protect a species says nothing about whether one should manage habitat to protect or enhance the species' numbers, unless the species is in imminent danger of extinction. If willingness to pay is to be a guide, it needs to be better tied to population numbers, especially the minimum viable population.