Session-effects in the laboratory

In experimental economics, where subjects participate in different sessions, observations across subjects of a given session might exhibit more correlation than observations across subjects in different sessions. The main goal of this paper is to clarify what are session-effects: what can cause them, what forms they can take, and what are the potential problems. It will be shown that standard solutions are at times inadequate, and that their properties are sometimes misunderstood.     

Implications of nanotechnology growth in food and agriculture in OECD countries

This article provides an analysis of the implications of the growth of nanotechnology in the agriculture and food sector in OECD countries. Three main policy challenges are identified related to funding and investment, risk governance, and public acceptance. Each of these interconnected challenges underlines a number of ethical questions that need to be addressed. Several recommendations are laid out to move forward and adapt to these emerging policy issues.     

Learning in a multilateral bargaining experiment

This paper analyzes data from an investigation of a majoritarian bargaining experiment. A learning model is proposed to account for the evolution of play in this experiment. It is also suggested that an adjustment must be made to account for the panel structure of the data. Such adjustments have been used in other fields and are known to be important as unadjusted standard errors may be severely biased downward. These results indicate that this adjustment also has an important effect in this application. Furthermore, an efficient estimator that takes into account heterogeneity across players is proposed. A unique learning model to account for the paths of play under two different amendment rules cannot be rejected with the standard estimator with adjusted standard errors, however it can be rejected using the efficient estimator. The data and the estimated learning model suggest that after proposing “fair” divisions, subjects adapt and their proposals change rapidly in the treatment where uneven proposals are almost always accepted. Their beliefs in the estimated learning model are influenced by more than just the most recent outcomes.     

Crises and liquidity in over-the-counter markets

We study the efficiency of liquidity provision by dealers and the desirability of policy intervention in over-the-counter (OTC) markets during crises. We emphasizes two OTC frictions: finding counterparties takes time, and trade is bilateral and involves bargaining. We model a crisis as a shock that reduces investors? asset demands, lasting until a random recovery time. In this context, dealers can provide liquidity to investors by accumulating asset inventories. When OTC frictions are severe, even well capitalized dealers may not find it privately optimal to accumulate inventories, and direct purchase by the government can improve welfare.     

Identification of lagged duration dependence in multiple-spell competing risks models

We show that lagged duration dependence is non-parametrically identified in mixed proportional hazard models for duration data, in the presence of competing risks and consecutive spells.     

How Robust is Laboratory Gift Exchange?

The gift-exchange game is a form of sequential prisoner's dilemma, developed by Fehr et al. (1993), and popularized in a series of papers by Ernst Fehr and co-authors. While the European studies typically feature a high degree of gift exchange, the few U.S. studies provide some conflicting results. We find that the degree of gift exchange is surprisingly sensitive to an apparently innocuous change—whether or not a comprehensive payoff table is provided in the instructions. We also find significant and substantial time trends in responder behavior.     

More strategies, more Nash equilibria

We show in this paper that for the class of two-player games with compact real intervals as strategy spaces and continuous and strictly quasi-concave payoff functions there exists a monotone relation between the size of strategy spaces and the number of Nash equilibria. These sufficient conditions for our theorem to hold are shown to be tight.     

Stochastic modelling of herd behaviour indices

This paper proposes different diffusion processes to model herd behaviour indices such as the Herd Behaviour Index (HIX). These models arise by combining popular mean-reverting processes with simple algebraic functions mapping the definition domain of the underlying mean-reverting process to the unit interval. The so obtained Itô processes preserve, to some extent, the mean-reverting trend of the underlying process while satisfying the fundamental properties of the so-called herd behaviour indices. In a numerical study, we calibrate the different model settings to time series data for a period spanning from January 2000 until October 2009 and investigate their ability to predict the future behaviour of herd behaviour indices.     

A preliminary comparison of the retail level effects of genetically modified food labelling policies in Canada and France

Most developed countries have adopted labelling policies for genetically modified (GM) food. In April 2004, Canada implemented a voluntary labelling policy for GM and non-GM food, while France adopted the European Union’s new extended mandatory labelling of GM food. I present the result of a qualitative survey of GM and non-GM food labels in supermarkets in Canada and France, five months after the introduction of the new policies. I find that there are almost no GM labelled products in France and non-GM labelled products in Canada. Each policy tends to crowd out the targeted label attribute. However, Canadian consumers can choose between GM and non-GM organic products, whereas there are only non-GM products in French supermarkets. Recent political developments in Quebec suggest that the labelling landscape may change in Canada, either with an increase in the number of non-GM products at the retail level or a transition towards a mandatory labelling policy like in France.