Sealed bid auctions versus ascending bid auctions: an experimental study

This paper considers two multi-item auction formats (ascending and sealed bid) which both identify the minimum Walrasian equilibrium prices and where truthful preference revelation constitutes an equilibrium. Even though these auction formats share many theoretical properties, there are behavioral aspects that are not easily captured. To explore this issue in more detail, this paper experimentally investigates what role the design of the auction format has for its outcome. The results suggest that the sealed bid mechanism performs weakly better in all of the investigated measures (consistent reporting, efficiency etc.). In addition, we find that the performance of the ascending auction is increasing over time, whereas the sealed bid auction shows no such tendency.     

The role of accident theory in injury prevention - time for the pendulum to swing back

Injury prevention is a branch of safety sciences. While comprehensive theoretical developments occurred in the wider field in the last decades, little of these developments reached and influenced the injury prevention community. Instead, a clear retro trend 'back to basics' is seen among injury prevention scholars, especially to Dr William Haddon's pioneering work some 50 years ago. This paper intends to draw attention to this polarisation and discuss possible explanations. It is argued that the strong campaign against the accident concept among leading injury prevention groupings became a serious hindrance for theoretical exchange. The underlying process is interpreted in terms of a struggle for ownership over this truly interdisciplinary field of research, unfortunately at the expense of theoretical stagnation in injury prevention circles and lessened interest in collaboration from other scientific areas. This paper is written as a tribute to Professor Leif Svanstr?m and his scientific contributions, with special regard to his genuine interest in interdisciplinary research.     

When is your experience valuable? Occupation-industry transitions and self-employment success

The literature on employee spinoffs has, for a long time, stressed the importance of industry-specific skills and experiences in explaining the success of new firms. We argue that employees also develop skills that are associated with their occupation within an industry, and that success as an entrepreneur, therefore, is also contingent on the relation between the entrepreneurs’ previous occupation and the industry in which they operate as self-employed. Using matched employer-employee data, we develop a measure, occupational spin-offs, that accounts for this relation. An occupational spin-off is defined as a start-up in the most common industry, given the previous occupation of the founder. We then show that entrepreneurs starting occupational spinoffs enjoy above average income from self-employment and have longer spells as business owners.     

Tourism as a mixed industry: Differences between private, public and not-for-profit festivals

This paper discusses important policy and management implications of tourism as a mixed industry in which public, not-for-profit, and private organisations such as festivals both compete and collaborate in creating the tourist product. To illustrate, four samples of festivals from the UK, Australia, Norway and Sweden are systematically compared in terms of their ownership, governance, structure, and content. Although the festivals offered a similar product and had similar mandates, they differed considerably in terms of revenue sources, cost structure, use of volunteers, corporate sponsorship, and decision-making. These differences are potentially important to destinations that view festivals as attractions and use them in place marketing. Implications are drawn for festival management and tourism policy, and recommendations are made for extending this line of inquiry to the tourism industry as a whole.     

Optimizing or maximizing growth? A challenge for sustainable tourism

Virtually all destinations seek to increase tourist numbers, pursuing economic maximization strategies. Considerably less attention is paid to optimizing existing tourist systems to create more profitable, stable, resilient and potentially more sustainable entities. While aspects of tourist expenditure, average length of stay and seasonality as three key destination management variables have received considerable attention in the literature, focus has usually been on the identification of “profitable” tourism markets by considering observed patterns of spending, length of stay and vacation timing. Building on such earlier studies, this paper focuses on flexibilities in these parameters: could tourists have spent more, stayed longer or visited during a different season? Perceptions of destination expensiveness as a potential deterrent to visitation were also addressed. Based on a sample (n = 1914) of domestic and international tourists in the Swedish cities of Kalmar and Stockholm, data were collected in face-to-face interviews using questionnaires. Results indicate considerable potential to optimize the Swedish tourism system with regard to all variables studied, while also providing new insights for destination management in the context of economic resilience. Results also indicate the need for researchers everywhere to have detailed market knowledge if they are to persuade the industry to change its sustainability behavior.     

Empirical Evidence on the Relationship between Mobile Termination Rates and Firms' Profits

The theoretical literature on mobile termination rates (MTRs) is inconclusive on how the level of MTRs affects overall consumer charges and firms' profits. We show that when firms offer bundles with fixed included usage – a tariff structure that has become more common in recent years – an identical change in all MTRs does not affect firms' retail prices or profits. We use a panel dataset from saturated European markets to estimate the effect of MTRs on mobile operators' profits. As predicted by the theoretical model, we cannot reject the fact that firms' profits are unaffected by an identical change in all MTRs.     

A trust game in loss domain

In standard trust games, no trust is the default, and trust generates a potential gain. We investigate a reframed trust game in which full trust is default and where no trust generates a loss. We find significantly lower levels of trust and trustworthiness in the loss domain when full trust is default than in the gain domain when no trust is default. As a consequence, trust is on average profitable in the gain domain, but not in the loss domain. We also find that subjects respond more positively to higher trust in the loss domain than in the gain domain.     

Using traffic data to estimate wildlife populations

Wildlife populations are threatened worldwide by, among others, habitat fragmentation and hunting pressure. An important impediment for the large scale, national and regional, management of the populations is the difficulty to quantify population dynamics. The purpose of this study is to present a tool for such estimations which is based on available data in several countries; traffic load and traffic accidents with wildlife. An econometric model is developed, which accounts for landscape characteristics. It is applied to wild boar in Sweden, for which data on traffic load and accidents for different counties and years are available. Landscape characteristics are introduced with direct or indirect effects on population growth. The indirect landscape model gives the best statistical performance, and the results show relatively small differences in calculated intrinsic growth rate among counties but considerable differences in predicted population developments.     

An Experimental Study of Influences of Performance-Related Payments on Timing of Delegated Stock Purchases

Performance-related bonuses are important tools for investment organizations to incentivize stock traders. Yet, two experiments indicate that bonuses rewarding short-term performance may lead to worse timing of purchases. The authors propose that hyperbolic time discounting makes participants set lower aspired purchase prices for short-term (decreasing percentage) bonuses than for long-term (increasing percentage) bonuses. For this reason purchases are made earlier for decreasing than increasing percentage bonuses, earlier for decreasing than random prices, and earlier for high price volatility than for low price volatility. Neither purchases at the lowest price or highest bonus are attained. Hyperbolic time discounting may account for bubbles observed in experimental double-auction markets.     

Technological Opportunity and Growth

The article presents a model of technological opportunity, modeled as a resource that is exhaustible in the short run but renewable in the long run. The exploitation and regeneration of technological opportunity is the result of an interplay between intentional incremental and radical innovations and unintentionally made discoveries. The setting for the basic model is a multidimensional metric space where existing ideas are convexly combined in order to create new ideas. When the basic set theoretical features are included in a long-run R&D model, we derive the implications for paradigm duration as well as for the growth rate of technological knowledge. We show that whereas a larger pool of R&D workers have an ambiguous effect on the short run technological growth rate, it will lead to more frequent paradigm shifts in the long run.JEL classification: O31, O41* I am particularly indebted to Joel Mokyr for an extensive discussion on an earlier draft. I have also received valuable comments from Marcus Asplund, Wlodek Bursztyn, Douglas Hibbs, Lennart Hjalmarsson, Charlie Karlsson, Susanna Lundström, Joakim Persson, Paul Segerstrom, Fabrizio Zilibotti, Lars-Erik Öller, two referees, the editor of this journal, and from seminar participants at the EEAMeeting in Lausanne, Göteborg University, IIES at Stockholm University, Stockholm School of Economics, and FIEF. Generous financial support has been granted by the Wallander-Hedelius Foundation.