Die Marktabgrenzung im Versicherungskartellrecht am Beispiel der Berufshaftpflichtversicherungen

The definition of the relevant market is crucial to the application of European and German competition law and especially difficult when dealing with insurance markets. Generally, the product and geographic market comprises all products or services that are regarded as substitutable by consumers. In addition, the supply-side substitutability can be taken into consideration. In defining insurance product markets, the supply-side substitutability is decisive, because insurance products are seldom interchangeable from a policy holder’s point of view. Applying the concept of supply-side substitutability to professional indemnity insurances leads to product markets correlating with the different professional groups: Indemnity insurances for physicians constitute a product market; insurances for lawyers, notary publics, tax advisers and public accountants form another market and insurances for architects and construction engineers another one. These product markets are still national markets. Professional indemnity insurances are extensively shaped by the differing legal systems, namely by national insurance contract law, by liability provisions and by a legal obligation to insure. Consequently, policy holders cannot substitute their indemnity insurance with foreign insurance products and insurers are confronted with market entry barriers. However, the proposed directive on services on the internal market and the adopted directive on insurance mediation could result in community-wide markets in the near future.     

Can People Explain Their Own Vote? Introspective Questions as Indicators of Salience in the 1995 Quebec Referendum on Sovereignty

Most scholars doubt that voters are able to explain their own vote. We argue that introspective questions whereby respondents are invited to tell, in their own words, the reasons why they vote the way they do, provide useful information on which considerations are most salient in their voting decisions. We show that open-ended questions about reasons for voting Yes or No in the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty help us to sort out subgroups of voters for whom a given consideration is more salient.     

A class of multiattribute utility functions

A function u(z) is a utility function if u′(z) > 0. It is called risk averse if we also have u′′(z) < 0. Some authors, however, require that u ⁽ⁱ⁾(z) > 0 if i is odd and u ⁽ⁱ⁾(z) < 0 if i is even. The notion of a multiattribute utility function can be defined by requiring that it is increasing in each variable and concave as an s-variate function. A stronger condition, similar to the one in case of a univariate utility function, requires that, in addition, all partial derivatives of total order m should be positive if m is odd and negative if m is even. In this paper, we present a class of functions in analytic form such that each of them satisfies this stronger condition. We also give sharp lower and upper bounds for E[u(X ₁,... , X _s )] under moment information with respect to the joint probability distribution of the random variables X ₁,... , X _s assumed to be discrete and representing wealths. Partially supported by OTKA grants F-046309 and T-047340 in Hungary.     

How do conventions evolve?

The paper argues that, even in the absence of bureaucratic inertia, the transition from one convention to a superior one can be blocked. Because of the self-reinforcing mechanism generated by coordination effects, the economy can be locked-in to an Pareto-inferior convention. In the framework of evolutionary game theory, convention appears to be an evolutionary stable strategy. We show that the endogenous diffusion of a superior convention is possible but requires the presence of some social or cultural differentiation in order that coordination effects can be localized. The social or cultural links provide no information about the structure of the game, but help people to coordinate themselves by providing external points of reference. We construct a model where matching between agents respects a certain localization of interactions related to social or cultural similarity. These results are used to enlighten the surprising success of japanese labor management in US and UK transplants.     

Optimum income taxation and layoff taxes

This paper analyzes optimum income taxation in a model with endogenous job destruction that gives rise to unemployment. It is shown that optimal tax schemes comprise both payroll and layoff taxes when the state provides public unemployment insurance and aims at redistributing income. The optimal layoff tax is equal to the social cost of job destruction, which amounts to the sum of unemployment benefits (that the state pays to unemployed workers) and payroll taxes (that the state does not get when workers are unemployed).     

Dividend policy of German firms: A panel data analysis of partial adjustment models

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows, but a higher proportion of their published profits than UK and US firms. We estimate partial adjustment models and report two major findings. First, German firms base their dividend decisions on cash flows rather than published earnings as (i) published earnings do not correctly reflect performance because German firms retain parts of their earnings to build up legal reserves, (ii) German accounting is conservative, (iii) published earnings are subject to more smoothing than cash flows. Second, to the opposite of UK and US firms, German firms have more flexible dividend policies as they are willing to cut the dividend when profitability is only temporarily down.     

COMPENDIA: Harmonizing Business Ownership Data Across Countries and Over Time

This paper presents a harmonized data set over the period 1972–2002, containing two-yearly data on the number of non-agricultural business owners and the size of the labour force for 23 OECD countries, as well as the quotient of these two variables which is called the business ownership rate of a country. The data set is called COMPENDIA, which means COMParative ENtrepreneurship Data for International Analysis. It has been constructed by EIM Business and Policy Research, using OECD statistics as well as other relevant sources. We make an attempt to make business ownership rates comparable across countries and over time.     

Events and economic forecasting models

In the June 1972 issue of Futures, Olaf Helmer developed the idea of cross-impact analysis to include both events (singular occurrences) and trends (gradual developments).¹ The present article pursues further this idea, using an econometric forecasting model to represent the economic trends in an economy, and a sequential cross-impact method to analyse the events which could change its course. The application of this idea, also described in the article, suggests a procedure for improving the communication between model builders and final users.     

Entry and Competition in the Postal Market: Foundations for the Construction of Entry Scenarios*

This paper presents a model of entry and imperfect competition, which is inspired by the product differentiation literature and incorporates facts pertaining to the postal sector. There are two operators: incumbent and potential entrant. The entrant offers only one of the products (commercial mail) with a specific technology and delivers only to part of the addressees (located in low cost areas). Its degree of coverage is viewed as a quality attribute; it affects demand and hence market share. The incumbent faces a USO while the entrant is an unregulated profit maximizing firm. To illustrate the potential applications of our approach, we provide some numerical simulations of entry scenarios.