Rent, risk, and replication: Preference adaptation in winner-take-all markets

We study the evolution of an economy where agents who are heterogeneous with respect to risk attitudes can either earn a certain income or enter a risky rent-seeking contest. We assume that agents behave rationally given their preferences, but that the population distribution of preferences evolves over time in response to material payoffs. We show that, in particular, initial distributions with full support converge to stationary states where all types are still present. Although rents are perfectly dissipated in material terms at a steady state, efficiency is greater than if everybody had been risk neutral, since risk lovers specialize in rent seeking.     

关于证券市场投资者风险偏好的实证研究

根据显现偏好理论,投资者的投资行为显现了其内在的风险偏好。在本文中,采用均衡分析方法,以中国证券市场中的指数序列为样本,综合期望收益、方差,自相关系数等统计量,准确反映证券组合的投资价值,揭示市场中投资者作为一个整体所具有的风险偏好和投资组合无差异曲线的形式。     

经济人的“再生”:对一种新综合的探讨与辩护

本文力图对经济学帝国主义现象中复兴的新经济人提供一个较明确的描述,纠正倡导者和批评者共通的某些误解。本文的重点是:通过把社会偏好、个人社会价值等概念引入经济人模型的讨论之中,给能纳入这一分析范式的行为(特别是利他行为)确定某些标准;重新界定经济人在不同层次上的理性行为特征,以说明赋予经济人的理性程度将取决于所研究的主题的具体情形;进而,讨论经济人的标准原型及其变型在理论分析中各自适用的范围和局限性。     

Partial moment volatility indices

Forward‐looking partial moment volatility indices are developed using state‐pricing, called the bear index (BEX) and bull index (BUX). Using S&P 500 index (SPX) option prices, we find that BEX and BUX provide superior forecasts for the lower and upper partial moments of future market realised volatility, respectively. We examine the relation between SPX returns and changes in BEX and BUX at the daily level. Results are consistent with the volatility feedback hypothesis. Further, we show that BEX may be more suitable as the ‘investor fear gauge’ than VIX.     

Electricity supply preferences in Europe: Evidence from subjective well-being data

We use survey data for 139,517 individuals in 25 European countries, 2002–2011, to estimate the relationship between subjective well-being (SWB) and production shares of various electricity generation technologies. The estimated relationships are taken to represent preference relationships over attributes of electricity supply systems (costs, safety, environmental friendliness, etc.). Controlling for a variety of individual and macro-level factors, we find that individuals’ SWB varies systematically and significantly with differences in the electricity mix across countries and across time. Among other results, we find that a greater share of solar & wind power relative to nuclear power and electricity from coal and oil is associated with greater SWB at all levels of income and that the implied preference for solar & wind power over nuclear power has risen drastically after the Fukushima nuclear accident.     

Preference shocks,international frictions,and international business cycles

Replicating the degree of cross-country comovements of macroeconomic aggregates, dynamics of prices and quantities of international trade, and the behavior of consumption and labor remains an important challenge in international business cycle literature. This paper incorporates preference shocks into a standard two-country model in which there exist international frictions, such as costs of transportation and restrictions to international asset trade. Country-specific preference shocks that generate fluctuations in each country's consumption and labor solve the puzzles, except for the discrepancy between theory and data regarding international trade variables. The presence or absence of international frictions plays a limited role in solving the puzzles.     

Advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation.     

Does the spatial representation affect criteria weights in environmental decision-making? Insights from a behavioral experiment

The need and interest to consider cognitive and motivational biases has been recognized in different disciplines (e.g. economics, decision theory, risk analysis) and has recently reached environmental decision-making. Within this domain, the intrinsic presence of a spatial dimension of both alternatives and criteria calls for the use of maps throughout the decision-making process to properly represent the spatial distribution of the features under analysis. This makes spatial Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) a particularly interesting domain to explore new dimensions of cognitive biases. This study proposes a behavioral experiment aimed at discovering to what extent the spatial visualization (i.e. maps) of criteria versus the non-spatial one (i.e. tables) can bias the weight elicitation phase of a spatial MCDA process. The experiment simulates a very common analysis in environmental and land use planning: land suitability analysis. Our findings show that there are significant consequences on how important we perceive a certain criterion to be, depending on whether it is represented as a map or as a table among a mix of maps and tables. Indeed, the map representation of the same criterion leads to higher weights attributed to that criterion compared to the table representation. Visualizing the same information as a map or as a table, although technically equivalent, is thus not psychologically equivalent for Decision Makers. The results of this experiment are expected to have implications for spatial decision-making processes, by generating better awareness on the impacts of map-mediated land suitability analysis.     

Strategy-proof preference aggregation: Possibilities and characterizations

An aggregation rule maps each profile of individual strict preference orderings over a set of alternatives into a social ordering over that set. We call such a rule strategy-proof if misreporting one's preference never produces a different social ordering that is between the original ordering and one's own preference. After describing two examples of manipulable rules, we study in some detail three classes of strategy-proof rules: (i) rules based on a monotonic alteration of the majority relation generated by the preference profile; (ii) rules improving upon a fixed status-quo; and (iii) rules generalizing the Condorcet–Kemeny aggregation method.     

Staged venture capital contracting with ratchets and liquidation rights

This paper uses real options analysis to study later round financing in the presence of two standard venture capital contracting provisions: anti-dilution (ratchet) and liquidation preference. We argue that such provisions can preclude financing of a positive NPV venture in the case of a large follow-on financing relative to firm value. Liquidation preference contracting at multiples greater than one is not feasible in the later round if the financing is small relative to firm value. We highlight an interaction effect between the two provisions: increasing the liquidation multiple can help to avoid dilution and the need for the prior venture capitalist to waive ratchet provisions.