Additive and Multiplicative Uncertainty Revisited: What Explains the Contrasting Biases?

above the certainty level while for additive uncertainty the price should be lower than the certainty level. This note gives an intuitive explanation for the result after first presenting a parsimonious review of the two models. We also discuss which, if either, of the two models is more realistic. Received December 14, 2001; revised version received July 16, 2002 Published online: April 30, 2003 We thank referees for helpful comments. Ciaran Driver would like to acknowledge the research facilities from ANU, Canberra for their help in writing this paper.     

Corporate Board Composition, Protocols, and Voting Behavior: Experimental Evidence

We examine voting by a board designed to mitigate conflicts of interest between privately informed insiders and owners. Our model demonstrates that, as argued by researchers and the business press, boards with a majority of trustworthy but uninformed “watchdogs” can implement institutionally preferred policies. Our laboratory experiments strongly support this conclusion. Our model also highlights the necessity of penalties on insiders when there is dissension among board members. However, penalties for dissent appeared to have little impact on the experimental outcomes.     

Factor Taxation, Income Distribution and Capital Market Integration

This paper addresses the optimal mix of capital and wage taxation when policymakers maximize the political support of workers and capitalists, subject to a fixed revenue requirement. Capital market integration increases the efficiency costs of a tax on capital but simultaneously changes the political equilibrium through its effect on the distribution of factor incomes. These distributional effects are directly opposed in the capital importing and the capital exporting region. While the capital tax rate will always be lowered in the capital importing region, the tax rate in the exporting country will rise when political resistance to market-induced changes in the distribution of income is sufficiently high.