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中国与欧盟在政治、经济、文化诸方面的深度合作无需多言,作为欧盟派驻在华的工作人员,我们衷心希望,中欧海关合作能够“更上层楼”。     

How to shake the invisible hand (when Robinson meets Friday)

We propose defining the invisible hand by: (i) modelling the mechanism itself (rather than just assuming its existence); and (ii) making explicit the limit conditions of its working. For that purpose, we simply assimilate the working of the invisible hand mechanism with the existence of a social preference such that individual and social optimalities are consistent. In introducing the possibility of interaction among individuals, we then suggest that the standard singleton case, or atomistic individualism, is just an extreme feature of a more general requirement that we call the  network agreement . Our main result is that the invisible hand mechanism does keep on working when there is an interaction between Robinson and Friday if the former (respectively, the latter) is sensitive to the latter (respectively, the former) in such a way that they exhibit some agreement in preferences. Hence, the singleton case naturally satisfies this property because neither Robinson nor Friday can disagree with himself. Further cooperative situations are also allowed in order to extent the invisible hand mechanism to cases with interactions.     

The debt hangover: Renegotiation with noncontractible investment

This paper analyses the incentives of the equityholders of a levered company to undertake noncontractible investments. This noncontrability is shown to seriously impede the efficiency of any renegotiation process in the debt overhang problems. Conditions for obtaining a fully efficient level of investment choice are derived.     

Decision neuroscience and consumer decision making

This article proposes that neuroscience can shape future theory and models in consumer decision making and suggests ways that neuroscience methods can be used in decision-making research. The article argues that neuroscience facilitates better theory development and empirical testing by considering the physiological context and the role of constructs such as hunger, stress, and social influence on consumer choice and preferences. Neuroscience can also provide new explanations for different sources of heterogeneity within and across populations, suggest novel hypotheses with respect to choices and underlying mechanisms that accord with an understanding of biology, and allow for the use of neural data to make better predictions about consumer behavior. The article suggests that despite some challenges associated with incorporating neuroscience into research on consumer decision processes, the use of neuroscience paradigms will produce a deeper understanding of decision making that can lead to the development of more effective decision aids and interventions.     

Liquidity-saving mechanisms

This paper studies the incentives of participants in a real-time gross settlement system with and without the addition of a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM). Participants in the model face a liquidity shock and different costs for delaying payments. They trade off the cost of delaying a payment against the cost of borrowing liquidity from the central bank. The main contribution of the paper is to show that the design of an LSM has important implications for welfare. In particular, parameters determine whether the addition of an LSM increases or decreases welfare.