Florian Spiess, Ralph Gasser, Silvan Heller, Luca Rossetto, Loris Sauter, Heiko Schuldt, Competitive interactive video retrieval in virtual reality with vitrivr-VR, In: International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, 2021. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)

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Luca Rossetto, Matthias Baumgartner, Narges Ashena, Florian Ruosch, Romana Pernisch, Lucien Heitz, Abraham Bernstein, VideoGraph - Towards Using Knowledge Graphs for Interactive Video Retrieval, In: International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, 2021. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)

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Luca Rossetto, Ralph Gasser, Loris Sauter, Abraham Bernstein, Heiko Schuldt, A System for Interactive Multimedia Retrieval Evaluations, In: International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, 2021. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)

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Artem Dyachenko, Erich Walter Farkas, Marc Oliver Rieger, Volatility Dependent Structured Products, The Journal of Investing, Vol. 30 (2), 2021. (Journal Article)

We construct a derivative that depends on the SPY and VIX and, in this way, incorporates both the market risk premium and the variance risk premium. We show that the product’s Sharpe ratio is higher than the SPY Sharpe ratio. If we had invested $10,000 into the product, the product’s payoff would have been about $60,000 at the end of 2018. In comparison, if we invested $10,000 into the SPY, the SPY payoff would be only about $30,000. |
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Sina Rafati Niya, Danijel Dordevic, Markus Hurschler, Sarah Grossenbacher, Burkhard Stiller, A Blockchain-based Supply Chain Tracing to Empower The Swiss Dairy Value Chain, In: 2nd International Conference on Societal Automation, SA 2020, IEEE, Funchal, Portugal, 2021. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)

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Bruno Rodrigues, Cyrill Halter, Muriel Figueredo Franco, Eder John Scheid, Christian Killer, Burkhard Stiller, BluePIL: a Bluetooth-based Passive Indoor Localization Method, In: IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2021), IEEE, Bordeaux, France, 2021. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)

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Sina Rafati Niya, Danijel Dordevic, Burkhard Stiller, ITrade: A Blockchain-based, Self-Sovereign, and Scalable Marketplace for IoT Data Streams, In: IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2021), IEEE, Bordeaux, France, 2021-05-17. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
 
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Maria Pouri, Eight impacts of the digital sharing economy on resource consumption, Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, Vol. 168, 2021. (Journal Article)
 
Digital platforms have enabled huge efficiency in coordinating sharing practices among a large number of users. The proliferation of sharing platforms has formed a phenomenon often referred to – albeit not unanimously – as ‘the sharing economy’ or, more precisely, ‘the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE)’1. What makes the DSE special is its ability to enhance access to a wide variety of material and immaterial resources within large and spatially distributed communities of consumers; a feature that could not exist in traditional, small-scale sharing. This characteristic has been known as the enabling role of digital Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in transforming sharing practices and scaling up sharing networks. Such extensive changes brought by digital advancements can raise a number of important questions concerning sustainability (Salomon and Mokhtarian, 2008), as changes often come along with both opportunities and risks.
From a sustainability perspective, an evident impact of sharing resources is improved efficiency in consumption. Through sharing, the utilization of a resource increases to serve more demand, which translates to an optimization effect. Nevertheless, it is possible that increased efficiency is followed by unwanted impacts such as rebound effects. Therefore, to develop a critical perspective, efforts should be directed towards understanding and analyzing both the potential positive and negative impacts of the shared consumption promoted by digital platforms. Such analysis can be based on two major parts: First, identifying the type of the resource that is shared; second, investigating how sharing that resource can affect the sustainability of its consumption and other consumption patterns that it may promote. |
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Włodzimierz Strus, Jan Cieciuch, Higher-order factors of the Big Six – Similarities between Big Twos identified above the Big Five and the Big Six, Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 171, 2021. (Journal Article)
 
A substantial body of evidence has identified higher-order factors above the five basic dimensions of personality known as the Big Five. Indeed, two higher-order factors, and also one General Factor of Personality (GFP), have been found in many studies in data collected by using instruments intended to measure the Big Five in the Five-
Factor Model (FFM) framework. To date, however, there is a lack of studies that apply the methodology for identifying higher-order factors of the Big Five/FFM to the Big Six/HEXACO model, even though the latter is
currently deemed a serious alternative to the former. The goal of the presented studies was to fill this gap.
Namely, we tested whether similar higher-order factors to those identified above the Big Five/FFM can be found above the Big Six/HEXACO basic personality traits by applying analytical methods elaborated within the Big
Five/FFM framework. We conducted two studies: one with 805 participants, and another with 502 respondents, using three different Big Six/HEXACO measures and three Big Five/FFM measures. The obtained results suggest
the existence of two higher-order factors in the Big Six/HEXACO, similar to those found in the Big Five/FFM, and indicate no presence of the GFP in the former. |
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Steven Ongena, Ibolya Schindele, Dzsamila Vonnak, In lands of foreign currency credit, bank lending channels run through?, Journal of International Economics, Vol. 129, 2021. (Journal Article)

We study the impact of monetary policy on the supply of bank credit when bank lending is denominated in foreign currencies. Accessing a comprehensive supervisory dataset from Hungary, we find that the supply of bank credit in a foreign currency is less sensitive to changes in domestic monetary conditions than the equivalent supply in the domestic currency. Changes in foreign monetary conditions similarly affect bank lending more in the foreign than in the domestic currency. Hence when banks lend in multiple currencies the domestic bank lending channel is weakened and international bank lending channels become operational. |
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Manuel Mariani, Maria J Pallazi, Albert Solé-Ribalta, Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Claudio Tessone, Absence of a resolution limit in in-block nestedness, Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation, Vol. 94, 2021. (Journal Article)
 
Nestedness refers to a hierarchical organization of complex networks where a given node’s neighbors tend to form a subset of the neighborhoods of higher-degree nodes. Although nestedness has been traditionally interpreted as a macroscopic property that involves all the nodes of the network, recent works have reinterpreted it as a mesoscopic network property, by revealing that interactions in diverse empirical networks are often arranged into blocks that exhibit an internally nested structure. Inspired by the popular modularity function, these works rely on a quality function – called in-block nestedness – that assumes a partition of the nodes into blocks that exhibit an internal nested structure. A potential limitation of this approach is that the optimization of modularity (and related quality functions) notoriously suffers from resolution limits that impair the detectability of small blocks. Yet, we do not know whether the in-block nestedness function may exhibit similar resolution limits. Here, we provide numerical and analytical evidence that the in-block nestedness function lacks a resolution limit, which implies that our capacity to detect correct partitions in networks via its maximization depends solely on the accuracy of the optimization algorithms. |
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Carlos Alos-Ferrer, Johannes Buckenmaier, Federica Farolfi, Imitation, network size, and efficiency, Network Science (New York), Vol. 9 (1), 2021. (Journal Article)
 
A number of theoretical results have provided sufficient conditions for the selection of payoff-efficient equilibria in games played on networks when agents imitate successful neighbors and make occasional mistakes (stochastic stability). However, those results only guarantee full convergence in the long-run, which might be too restrictive in reality. Here, we employ a more gradual approach relying on agent-based simulations avoiding the double limit underlying these analytical results. We focus on the circular-city model, for which a sufficient condition on the population size relative to the neighborhood size was identified by Alós-Ferrer & Weidenholzer [(2006) Economics Letters, 93, 163–168]. Using more than 100,000 agent-based simulations, we find that selection of the efficient equilibrium prevails also for a large set of parameters violating the previously identified condition. Interestingly, the extent to which efficiency obtains decreases gradually as one moves away from the boundary of this condition. |
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Carlos Alos-Ferrer, Johannes Buckenmaier, Federica Farolfi, When are efficient conventions selected in networks?, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 124, 2021. (Journal Article)
 
We study the determinants of convergence to efficient conventions in coordination games played on networks, when agents focus on past performance (imitative play). Previous theoretical results provide an incomplete picture and suggest potentially-complex interactions between the features of dynamics and behavior. We conducted an extensive simulation study (with approximately 1.12 million simulations) varying network size, interaction and information radius, the probability of actual interaction, the probability of mistakes, tie-breaking rules, and the process governing revision opportunities. Our main result is that “more interactions,” be it in the form of larger interaction neighborhoods or of a higher interaction probability, lead to less coordination on efficient conventions. A second observation, confirming previous but partial theoretical results, is that a large network size relative to the size of neighborhoods (a “large world”) facilitates convergence to efficient conventions. Third, a larger information neighborhood helps efficiency because it increases visibility of efficient payoffs across the network. Last, technical details of the dynamic specification as tie-breaking or inertia, while often relevant for specific theoretical results, appear to be of little empirical relevance in the larger space of dynamics. |
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Hui-Kuan Chung, Carlos Alos-Ferrer, Philippe Tobler, Conditional valuation for combinations of goods in primates, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, Vol. 376 (1819), 2021. (Journal Article)
 
Valuing goods and selecting the one with the highest value forms the basis of adaptive behaviour across species. While it is obvious that the valuation of a given type of goods depends on ownership and availability of that type of goods, the effects of other goods on valuation of the original good are sometimes underappreciated. Yet, goods interact with each other, indicating that the valuation of a given good is conditional on the other goods it is combined with, both in the wild and the laboratory. Here, we introduce conditional valuation in the context of valuing multiple goods and briefly review how human and animal experimentalists can leverage economic tools for the study of interactions among goods. We then review evidence for conditional valuation for combined foods in both human and non-human primates. In the laboratory, non-human primates show increased valuation of certain combinations of foods but decreased valuation of other types of combinations. Thus, similarly to humans, monkeys appear to value combinations of goods in a conditional fashion. Additionally, both humans and monkeys appear to employ similar neural substrates for the valuation of single goods, such as the orbitofrontal cortex. Together, investigations of our evolutionary precursors may provide insights on how we value interacting goods.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Existence and prevalence of economic behaviours among non-human primates’. |
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Carlos Alos-Ferrer, Alexander Ritschel, Multiple behavioral rules in Cournot oligopolies, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 183, 2021. (Journal Article)
 
We study intra-individual behavioral heterogeneity in an experimental Cournot oligopoly. Previous empirical results in this setting have demonstrated convergence to competitive outcomes, in agreement with theoretical predictions assuming that players imitate successful opponents. We postulate that players sometimes rely on imitation of successful behavior, and sometimes best reply to the actions of others. Testable predictions are obtained from a model allowing for multiple behavioral rules which accounts for differences in the cognitive nature of the underlying decision processes. Those include non-trivial response time interactions depending on whether the rules share a common prescription (alignment) or not (conflict), a classification which is ex ante observable. The results confirm the hypotheses and support the presence of multiple behavioral rules at the individual level. |
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Domhnall O'Sullivan, Marc Chesney, Microimposto: a mais recente de uma série de ambiciosas iniciativas populares, In: SWI swissinfo.ch, 22 February 2021. (Media Coverage)

Uma iniciativa popular na Suíça está dando novo fôlego à antiga proposta de tributar as transações financeiras. No entanto, será que o “microimposto” conseguirá sair do papel? |
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Thomas Schlittler, Marc Chesney, Vom Entlebuch bis zum Paradeplatz: Das Gewerbe darbt, die Banken verbuchen Rekordgewinne, In: Blick, 21 February 2021. (Media Coverage)

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Miriam Rinawi, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Labour market transitions after layoffs: the role of occupational skills, Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 73 (1), 2021. (Journal Article)

We study the role of occupational skills for labour market transitions after layoffs. Drawing on Lazear’s skill-weights approach, we develop empirical measures for occupational specificity and the skill distance between occupations to investigate how skills map into job mobility and wages. Our analysis reveals several important insights. First, higher occupational specificity is associated with lower job mobility and a longer period of unemployment. However, it is also associated with higher wages. Workers receive a wage premium of about 9% for re-employment in a one standard deviation more specific occupation. These results suggest a risk–return trade-off to educational investments into more specific skills. Second, the skill distance is negatively associated with wages. Workers moving between occupations with similar skill requirements suffer smaller wage losses than those with more distant moves. Thus, skills appear to be transferable across occupations and to play a pivotal role in the determination of wages. |
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Nicolas Vogt, Thorsten Hens, Die Bedeutung des Zeithorizonts für Investitionen, In: www.idw-online.de, 19 February 2021. (Media Coverage)

Das Zeitempfinden und die in einer Gesellschaft mehr oder weniger vorhandene Geduld haben deutliche Auswirkungen auf deren Entfaltung. Die Studie „Universal Time Preference“ der Professoren Mei Wang, Marc Oliver Rieger und Thorsten Hens führt internationale Messungen zum Thema Zeit zusammen und aggregiert deren Daten. Daraus ergibt sich für 117 Länder der Erde eine erhebliche Vorhersagekraft für deren zukünftige Entwicklung.
Dass das Voranschreiten der Zeit relativ ist, hat bereits Albert Einstein gezeigt. Weniger aus physikalischer, sondern mehr aus sozialwissenschaftlicher und mathematischer Perspektive haben sich dem Thema Zeit Prof. Dr. Mei Wang von der WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management und ihre beiden Co-Autoren Prof. Dr. Marc Oliver Rieger (Universität Trier) und Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hens (Universität Zürich) genähert. Ihre Studie „Universal Time Preference“ kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass Zeit relativ ist und dass deren Wahrnehmung, ausgedrückt in Geduld, vor allem abhängig von der jeweiligen Kultur ist. |
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Peter Kuntz, Thorsten Hens, Alles eine Frage der Zeit, In: www.idw-online.de, 18 February 2021. (Media Coverage)

Bei vielen Entscheidungen auf politischer, wirtschaftlicher und gesellschaftlicher Ebene spielt die Komponente Zeit eine maßgebliche Rolle. Auf Länderebene beeinflussen beispiels-
weise zeitliche Parameter den Umgang mit der Staatsverschuldung, im individuellen Bereich die Haltung zum Sparen. Einstellungen und Vorlieben in Bezug auf Zeit sind in Ländern und Kulturen unterschiedlich ausgeprägt. Prof. Dr. Marc Oliver Rieger (Universität Trier), Prof. Dr. Mei Wang (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management) und Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hens (Universität Zürich) haben eine neue Methode zur Ermittlung eines länderspezifischen Zeitpräferenz-Faktors entwickelt, der auch valide internationale Vergleiche ermöglicht.
Der Trierer Wirtschaftswissenschaftler Marc Oliver Rieger erklärt das Phänomen und die Tragweite unterschiedlicher zeitlicher Präferenzen am Beispiel der europäischen Finanzkrise. „Tendenziell sind südeuropäische Länder stärker auf die Gegenwart fokussiert. Sie haben daher eine größere Bereitschaft, aktuelle Probleme durch eine höhere Schuldenaufnahme zu lösen, die sich erst in Zukunft nachteilig auswirkt. Andere Länder versuchen Verschuldung zu vermeiden, um daraus resultierende spätere Belastungen durch Schuldenabbau zu minimieren.“ |
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