The state and prospects of the mediterranean policy of the EC

After the European Community’s agreement with the Maghreb countries and the Lomé Convention the trump cards have been played in the game of the EC’s Mediterranean policy in the traditional sense. A new game is starting now, and the distribution of the cards is different.     

Thomas Gruber und Gero Himmelsbach Honorarprofessoren in Bamberg

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Voluntary contributions when the public good is not necessarily normal

We argue that there are interesting examples of privately provided public goods that do not satisfy the assumption of strict normality, and reconsider voluntary-contribution games in a more general framework. We show that, in general, (1) equalizing transfers between individuals with identical tastes can increase total supply of the public good, and (2) more of the public good can be supplied if agents move sequentially rather than simultaneously. These results are in sharp contrast to earlier conclusions derived in the literature under the assumption of strict normality.     

A Meta‐Analysis of the International Gender Wage Gap

Abstract.  Since the early 1970s, a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity. This meta‐study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology, data, and time periods, but also different countries. We place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators. The results show that data restrictions – i.e. the limitation of the analysis to new entrants, never‐marrieds, or one narrow occupation only – have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap. Moreover, we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation – like the frequent use of potential experience – has on the calculated gender wage gap. Over time, raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially; however, most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females.     

Reluctance to use technology‐related products: Development of a technophobia scale

Many consumers feel overloaded by the complexity of technology‐related products. This renders consumers less open to them and may even lead to an aversion or anxiety toward these kind of products: in other words, so‐called technophobia. This article aims to establish an instrument that measures technophobia. Following a literature review and in‐depth interviews with experts, a scale is developed and tested in seven different countries (United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, India, Mexico, and Austria; total sample size = 1,503 respondents). The three underlying dimensions of the scale—“Personal Failure,” “Human vs. Machine Ambiguity,” and “Convenience”—are discussed, and future research avenues to strengthen the cross‐national usability of the scale are identified. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A cyclic projection algorithm via duality

We consider the problem of finding the projection of a given point in a Hilbert space onto the intersection of finitely many closed convex sets. A very simple iterative procedure was established by Dykstra (1983), Boyle & Dykstra (1986), and Han (1988), which employs the projection operators onto the individual sets. When looking at a dual problem, the procedure turns out to be the primal formulation of a classical method. In this way a natural explanation of the projection method and a simpler proof of its convergence are obtained. Further investigations concern the asymptotic behaviour of dual quantities to be computed and convergence rates. Applications are given to convex quadratic programming and restricted least squares estimation, nonnegative MINQUE in covariance components models, and euclidean fit of distance matrices in data analysis.