Common Ground, Complex Problems and Decision Making

Organisations increasingly have to deal with complex problems. They often use multidisciplinary teams to cope with such problems where different team members have different perspectives on the problem, different individual knowledge and skills, and different approaches on how to solve the problem. In order to solve those problems, team members have to share their existing knowledge and construct new knowledge. Theory suggests that negotiation of common ground can positively affect team decision making on the solution of complex problems, by facilitating knowledge sharing across perspectives. In a small scale study with student groups, external representations supported by a specific negotiation ontology were used to facilitate negotiation by encouraging participants to make their beliefs and values explicit. Results showed that the external representations supported clarifying contributions to group members and increased group participation in discussions.     

Corruption in public service delivery: An experimental analysis

To improve our understanding of corruption in service delivery, we use a newly designed game that allows us to investigate the effects of the institutional environment on the behavior of service providers and their monitors. We focus on the effect of four different factors: whether monitors are accountable to the service recipients, the degree of observability of service providers’ effort, the providers’ wages and the providers’ professional norms. In accordance with theory, we find that service providers perform better when monitors are elected by service recipients and when their effort is more easily observed. However, there is only weak evidence that service providers perform better when paid more. Monitors are more vigilant when elected and when service providers are paid more. Playing the game with Ethiopian nursing students, we also find that those with greater exposure to the Ethiopian public health sector perform less well, either as provider or as monitor, when the experiment is framed as a public health provision scenario, suggesting that experience and norms affect behavior.     

Rural development and agricultural policy in the EEC

Decision making on integrated rural development projects is a complex affair. Dr van den Noort isolates some important elements in the process, puts them into an economic policy framework and examines them in relation to some experiences in the Netherlands and the EEC. A wide gap emerges between the philosophy and practice of agricultural and rural policy which bodes ill for the future of the EEC. If agricultural policies and rural development are to lead to greater intergration in the EEC then they must be used to increase a still to be defined general welfare function for the EEC and not to further narrow-minded regional policies.     

Regulating the Platform Economy: How to Protect Workers While Promoting Innovation

The rise of the platform economy has made it a topic of great interest among European policymakers, as evidenced by the European Commission’s 2016 Communication “A European agenda for the collaborative economy”. The regulatory challenges facing policymakers are manifold, ranging from taxation to competition policy to worker protection. Furthermore, many basic aspects of the platform economy are unclear, such as its size, the number of workers who take part in it and, indeed, its very definition. What types of regulation are necessary to ensure that the benefits of the platform economy are maximised for all Europeans? How can the productivity gains associated with the platform economy be distributed throughout society? Perhaps most importantly, how can policymakers support innovation while also protecting consumers, workers and communities?     

Subjective evaluation of delayed risky outcomes for buying and selling positions: the behavioral approach

This paper analyzes time discounting as a function of risk, using reservation prices. Based on experimental data, we compare bidder reservation prices for riskless assets with those for risky assets. The experiments rely on a second price auction with real monetary incentives and real delay in payoffs. We estimate the pure time discount rate for different maturities, considering riskless assets (bonds) and risky assets (delayed lotteries). An innovation in the experimental design allows disentangling pure time from pure risk discounting effects. If subjects bid for assets, we find implied discount rates for risky assets to be uniformly lower than those for riskless assets, across all maturities (the risk moderation effect). However, there is no risk moderation effect if subjects quote ask prices. We argue that delaying a payoff has a stronger effect on the price of bonds than on the price of risky assets since, in the case of bonds, the investor moves from a position of certainty to a position of risk, or uncertainty. Our findings on the risk moderation effect may be used to explain the attractiveness of compensation contracts with options, as commonly used in the financial industry.     

The Forex Regime and EMU Expansion

This paper provides evidence that the choice of the foreign exchange regime is not of first order importance for achieving high output growth. It is argued that due to the forward looking nature of the foreign exchange market, exchange rate stability hinges on the current and anticipated coherency of monetary and fiscal policies. We demonstrate this empirically on a panel including potential EMU accession countries. By means of rank regression analysis we uncover the partial links across the regime specifics of the representative country versus the German regime during the 1990s.