Do Entrepreneurs Need Firms? A Contribution to a Missing Chapter in Austrian Economics

The Review of Austrian Economics -     

Brown's original fictitious play

What modern game theorists describe as “fictitious play” is not the learning process George W. Brown defined in his 1951 paper. Brown's original version differs in a subtle detail, namely the order of belief updating. In this note we revive Brown's original fictitious play process and demonstrate that this seemingly innocent detail allows for an extremely simple and intuitive proof of convergence in an interesting and large class of games: nondegenerate ordinal potential games.     

The use of trading strategies by fund managers: some first survey evidence

A questionnaire survey has found that most fund managers rely on the strategies of buy-&-hold, momentum and contrarian trading. These strategies are typically applied mutually. Their use is rooted in the attributes and beliefs of the respective fund managers: buy-&-hold traders are fundamentally oriented, risk averse and are less (over)confident than others. Momentum traders appear as the least risk-averse professionals, going aggressively with the trend. Contrarian traders, however, show signs of overconfidence and peculiar risk aversion, both indicating difficulties in successful strategy implementation. The behavioural patterns revealed are not easily reconciled with efficient markets.     

U.S. Imports by origin: A system approach

Zusammenfassung U.S.-Importe nach Ursprungsl?ndern: Ein systematischer Ansatz.- Die amerikanischen Import-Nachfragefunktionen werden für sieben Ursprungsregionen gesch?tzt. Sie alle werden aus demselben Strukturmodell abgeleitet und gemeinsam gesch?tzt unter Beachtung der Restriktionen, die sich aus der Nachfragetheorie ergeben. Dieses Verfahren stellt sicher, da\ das System von Importnachfragefunktionen intern konsistent ist; die statistische Effizienz wird erh?ht. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, da\ die Elastizit?ten der Importe in bezug auf den eigenen Preis je nach Ursprungsregion sehr stark voneinander abweichen und da\ die besten Substitutionsm?glichkeiten zwischen Einfuhren aus Japan und denen aus einigen europ?ischen L?ndern bestehen.

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Resumen Las importaciones de los EEUU según su origen: un análisis sistemático. - Se estiman funciones de demanda de importaciones de los EEUU para siete regiones de origen. Las funciones de importaciones son derivadas de un mismo modelo estructural y estimadas simultáneamente respetando las restricciones sugeridas por la teoría de la demanda. Este procedimiento asegura que el sistema de funciones de demanda de importaciones sea consistente y que se mejore la eficiencia estadística. Los resultados indican que las elasticidadesprecio de la demanda de importaciones varían ampliamente entre las regiones de origen y que las mejores oportunidades para sustituír importaciones se encuentran en las importaciones provenientes del Japón y de algunos países de Europa.

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Résumé Importations des E.U. par origine: une approche systématique. - L’auteur estime des fonctions de la demande importatrice des E.U. pour sept régions d’origine. Toutes les fonctions d’importation sont dérivées du même modèle structurel, et elles sont estimées en commun sous les restrictions suggérées par la théorie de la demande. Cette procédure assure que le système des fonctions de demande importatrice est internement consistant et l’efficience statistique est augmentée. Les résultats indiquent que les propres élasticités de prix des importations varient largement entre des régions d’origine et que les possibilités de substitution sont les plus grandes entre les importations du Japon et les importations de quelques pays européens.

     

Job placement in Europe

The role of private employment agencies in job placement has increased in importance in many European countries during the last decade, but in others the public employment services still exercise a monopoly. The following paper offers an assessment of the experiences to date. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Fourth Maastricht Workshop in Law and Economics at the University of Limburg, April 25–27, 1991.     

Statistical study of foreign exchange rates, empirical evidence of a price change scaling law, and intraday analysis

In this paper we present a statistical analysis of four foreign exchange spot rates against the U.S. Dollar with several million intra-day prices over 3 years. The analysis also includes gold prices and samples of daily foreign exchange prices over 15 years. The mean absolute changes of logarithmic prices are found to follow a scaling law against the time interval on which they are measured. This empirical law holds although the distributions of the price changes strongly differ for different interval sizes.Systematic variations of the volatility are found even during business hours by an intra-day analysis of price changes. Seasonal heteroskedasticity is observed with a period of one day as well as one week as the result of an analogous intra-week analysis; taking this into account is necessary for any future study of intra-day price change distributions and their generating process. The same type of analysis is also made for the bid-ask spreads.