Kostentheoretisches zum Monopolproblem

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Effects of supervision on tax compliance: Evidence from a field experiment in Austria

We conduct a field experiment on tax compliance, focusing on newly founded firms. As a novelty the effect of tax authorities’ supervision on timely tax payments is examined. Interestingly, results show no positive overall effect of close supervision on tax compliance.     

Price and its Relation to Objective and Subjective Product Quality: Evidence from the Austrian Market

The correlation between price and product quality is usually found to be low, but still, consumers use a rule of thumb that higher prices indicate higher quality. In the present study, data from the Austrian consumer magazine Konsument from 2004 to 2007 were analysed, and price–quality correlations were computed. Results confirm former studies as the overall price–quality relation was positive and statistically significant but small (r = .30). It was especially small in the food and beverages sector as well as for cosmetics and for inexpensive products generally. Consumers' subjective beliefs about a price–quality link and product complexity were also analysed. Results show that consumers believe that a high price signals high quality, but that these beliefs are not well calibrated, i.e., not corresponding to the product categories where actually higher price–quality correlations can be found. In sum, the results confirm for the Austrian market that price is a poor signal of quality, and that consumers are hardly aware of the particular product sectors where this signal is more valid.     

The impact of introducing seven-day-trading on the Austrian electricity market

This paper analyses the impacts of the new daily green electricity production forecasting policy by the Austrian Green Electricity Settlement Agency (OEMAG) and the newly introduced seven-day electricity trading mechanism by the European Energy Exchange (EEX) on the Austrian electricity market. By treating these two market policy alterations as natural experiments and applying statistical and econometric methods to a unique data set, it is investigated whether thereby (i) a reduction of the green electricity production forecasting uncertainties and (ii) a generally more efficient electricity market with accompanying lower net costs is attained. Furthermore, we analyse whether (iii) seven-day-trading helps to mitigate the Friday-Monday effect that is often observed on stock and other exchanges markets. Finally, we investigate whether or not (iv) the underlying market design might tempt OEMAG to systematically overstate its forecasts on green power generation.     

Learning competitive pricing strategies by multi-agent reinforcement learning

In electronic marketplaces automated and dynamic pricing is becoming increasingly popular. Agents that perform this task can improve themselves by learning from past observations, possibly using reinforcement learning techniques. Co-learning of several adaptive agents against each other may lead to unforeseen results and increasingly dynamic behavior of the market. In this article we shed some light on price developments arising from a simple price adaptation strategy. Furthermore, we examine several adaptive pricing strategies and their learning behavior in a co-learning scenario with different levels of competition. Q-learning manages to learn best-reply strategies well, but is expensive to train.     

Bemerkungen zur Grenzproduktivitätstheorie

Ohne Zusammenfassung