Sex discrimination and competition in product and labour markets

Theoritical explanations for wage discrimination collapse in the long run, because competition should drive discriminations firms out of the market. In product markets with imperfect competition employes with a taste for discrimination might survive, None the less inthis case long-run efffects are also unclear, unless some monopsonistic power in the labour market is involved. Monopsony in the labour market, on the other hand, has received very little attention in the literature. The paper tries to pick up this long negleted issue, looking at the impact of concentration in output markets and local labour markets on wage discrimination by sex in Austria. As limited workers' mobility enables employers to define their own local labour markets,special attention is given to married women, whose geographical mobility is known to be very low.     

Elements of a European ports policy

Shipping and ports are like Siamese twins: neither can live without the other. The trouble is that due to rapid technical progress in shipbuilding it has become difficult to provide the shipping industry with both in the right proportion and at the same time.     

QIS4 – Konzeption des europäischen Standardansatzes und Kapitalausstattung für Schaden-Unfallversicherer – Analyse und Beurteilung

The paper examines the updated requirements for risk based capital evaluation within the framework of the European Solvency??II project. The early results for the quantitative impact study QIS4 will be shown and feasible effects on the insurance industry will be derived. In contrast to the previous system, Solvency??II is based on a market value approach which gives incentives to insurance companies to improve their internal risk management and assessment procedures through the enforcement of riskadequate illustration of the overall risk position. Here probability distributions are calculated for each risk categories in the standard approach. For this reason a quantitative term is derived to assess the overall risk position of an insurer which arises from the aggregation of each single risk considering the diversification effect. The extent of uncertainty is predetermined by the legislator. For the acceptance of future arrangements it will be important to answer the question whether these approaches are manageable and adequate.     

Concessions Dynamics in Electronic Negotiations: A Cross-Lagged Regression Analysis

We analyze concession patterns in electronic negotiations using a modified version of the Actor–Partner Interdependence Model (APIM). Our extension of the APIM takes into account that concessions in negotiations can only be evaluated in terms of utilities of the receiving side. We show that actor and partner effects in that model can directly be related to central concepts of negotiation theory such as cooperative versus distributive bargaining tactics and reciprocity. Based on this connection, we formulate hypotheses on the differences of actor and partner effects between successful and failed negotiations. We test these hypotheses on two existing data sets. Results show consistent and strong actor effects, while partner effects are only present in specific settings.     

The private value single item bisection auction

In this paper we present a new iterative auction, the bisection auction, that can be used for the sale of a single indivisible object. The bisection auction has fewer rounds than the classical English auction and causes less information to be revealed than the Vickrey auction. Still, it preserves all characteristics the English auction shares with the Vickrey auction: there exists an equilibrium in weakly dominant strategies in which everyone behaves truthfully, the object is allocated in accordance with efficiency requirements to the buyer who has the highest valuation, and the price paid by the winner of the object equals the second-highest valuationElena Grigorieva acknowledges support by the Dutch Science Foundation NWO through grant 401-01-101. Jean-Jacques Herings acknowledges support by the Dutch Science Foundation NWO through a VICI-grant. Rudolf Müller acknowledges support by European Commission through funds for the International Institute of Infonomics