A market model of analysts’ opinions to explain changes in the dispersion of opinions

The demand for and supply of analysts’ opinions in this model yield an equilibrium that demonstrates how the information content of the opinions reacts to changes in exogenous parameters. The model also shows how changes in the parameters make analysts’ opinions more or less dispersed; for example, a decline in investor risk aversion, a decrease in market volatility, and an increase in information costs can lead to analysts’ opinions becoming more similar. Recognizing how exogenous factors can affect the supply and demand of analysts’ opinions gives additional insights into questions concerning what may appear to be herd behavior by analysts and also the relationship between forecast dispersion and information content. (JEL: G29, C71)     

Immobiliencontrolling — Optimierung der immobilienbezogenen Kosten durch Gründung einer Generalmietgesellschaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung Dipl.-Ing. (univ.) Michael Belau ist Director und Head of Rental Management Dipl.-Wirtschaftsing. (FH) Michael Schildger ist Vice President und Head of Finance Dr. Verena Sturm ist Manager Corporate Real Estate Services     

On optimality in intergenerational risk sharing

Summary. This paper defines and studies optimality in a dynamic stochastic economy with finitely lived agents, and investigates the optimality properties of an equilibrium with or without sequentially complete markets. Various Pareto optimality concepts are considered, including interim and ex ante optimality. We show that, at an equilibrium with a productive asset (land) and sequentially complete markets, the intervention of a government may be justified, but only to improve risk sharing between generations. If markets are incomplete, constrained interim optimality is investigated in two-period lived OLG economies. We extend the optimality properties of an equilibrium with land and give conditions under which introducing a pay-as-you-go system at an equilibrium would not lead to any Pareto improvement. Received: October 5, 1998; revised version: April 3, 2001     

Länger leben — Siechtum und Pflege ohne Grenzen?

At present, our society and its social security system are not prepared to cope with the challenges resulting from the continuous increase of life expectancy. The traditional concept of disease has to be modified for serving the special needs of the elderly. The optimistic compression of disease theory is an intriguing model, but lacks prove by available data. The anti-aging boom diverts the focus from the social and financial burden that will be unevitably caused by long-term care in the future. If there will not be an — up to now unforeseeable — breakthrough in research, particularly dementia will have an enormous impact on social cost which is often underestimated.     

Efficient Liability Rules: Complete Characterization

Received May, 18, 2000; revised version received March, 19, 2001     

Monopoly with resale

We examine the intricacies associated with the design of revenue‐maximizing mechanisms for a monopolist who expects her buyers to resell. We consider two cases: resale to a third party who does not participate in the primary market and interbidder resale, where the winner resells to the losers. To influence the resale outcome, the monopolist must design an allocation rule and a disclosure policy that optimally fashion the beliefs of the participants in the secondary market. Our results show that the revenue‐maximizing mechanism may require a stochastic selling procedure and a disclosure policy richer than the simple announcement of the decision to sell to a particular buyer.     

Cardinality-based equality of opportunities

We study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. We compare profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information provided by two cardinal measures: the number of common alternatives in all sets of a given profile and the difference between the number of alternatives in the individual sets. We also show that, under additional axioms, we can combine these criteria only in a weighted procedure or in some lexicographic refinements of a weighted procedure.