How long does celebrity meaning transfer last? Delayed effects and the moderating roles of brand experience,celebrity liking,and age

Extending previous research on celebrity endorsements, the study investigates whether the meaning of celebrities is transferred to endorsed brands and how transfer effects develop over time. Additionally, the moderating roles of brand experience, celebrity liking, and consumers’ age are investigated. The hypothesized effects are modeled using a propositional learning approach with an experimental repeated-measures design (panel data). Results confirm the assumed meaning transfer effect. In addition, the effects appear to be substantially stronger after about a week indicating some type of sleeper effect. Furthermore, the effects increase with increasing brand experience and celebrity liking. Adolescent consumers are not differently affected when compared to adults and controlled for the differing levels of brand experience. Results are discussed in light of propositional learning theory. Future areas of research are proposed.     

The influence of investment experience on market prices: laboratory evidence

We run laboratory experiments to analyze the impact of prior investment experience on price efficiency in asset markets. Before subjects enter the asset market they gain either no, positive, or negative investment experience in an investment game. To get a comprehensive picture about the role of experience we implement two asset market designs. One is prone to inefficient pricing, exhibiting bubble and crash patterns, while the other exhibits efficient pricing. We find that (i) both, positive and negative, experience gained in the investment game lead to efficient pricing in both market settings. Further, we show that (ii) the experience effect dominates potential effects triggered by positive and negative sentiment generated by the investment game. We conjecture that experiencing changing price paths in the investment game can create a higher sensibility on changing fundamentals (through higher salience) among subjects in the subsequently run asset market.     

Catching up of emerging economies: the role of capital goods imports,FDI inflows,domestic investment and absorptive capacity

We show that the impact of capital goods imports and FDI inflows on economic convergence depends on the local capacity of emerging economies to absorb superior technologies.     

What does IT Take for Congress to Enact Good Policies? an Analysis of Roll Call Voting in the US Congress

We study the conditions under which members of Congress incorporate policy‐specific considerations in their decisions. To do this, we estimate a model that accounts for the influence of private information about legislation quality on voting patterns in the House and Senate. We find that minority party members are more likely to evaluate proposals on their merits than majority members, but institutional and electoral considerations significantly attenuate these partisan differences. In particular, seniority, electoral safety, and constituents' political knowledge have a balancing effect on partisan predispositions to rely on policy‐relevant information, making minority (majority) members less (more) likely to vote informatively.     

Bounds for Actuarial Present Values Under the Fractional Independence Assumption

We consider the fractional independence (FI) survival model, studied by Willmot (1997), for which the curtate future lifetime and the fractional part of it satisfy the statistical independence assumption, called the fractional independence assumption.

The ordering of risks of the FI survival model is analyzed, and its consequences for the evaluation of actuarial present values in life insurance is discussed. Our main fractional reduction (FR) theorem states that two FI future lifetime random variables with identical distributed curtate future lifetime are stochastically ordered (stop-loss ordered) if, and only if, their fractional parts are stochastically ordered (stop-loss ordered).

The well-known properties of these stochastic orders allow to find lower and upper bounds for different types of actuarial present values, for example when the random payoff functions of the considered continuous life insurances are convex (concave), or decreasing (increasing), or convex not decreasing (concave not increasing) in the future lifetime as argument. These bounds are obtained under the assumption that some information concerning the moments of the fractional part is given. A distinction is made according to whether the fractional remaining lifetime has a fixed mean or a fixed mean and variance. In the former case, simple unique optimal bounds are obtained in case of a convex (concave) present value function.

The obtained results are illustrated at the most important life insurance quantities in a continuous random environment, which include bounds for net single premiums, net level annual premiums and prospective net reserves.