Bruno Frey, Katja Rost, Quantitative and Qualitative Rankings of Scholars, Schmalenbach Business Review (sbr), Vol. 63 (1), 2011. (Journal Article)
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Thomas Epper, Helga Fehr-Duda, Renate Schubert, Energy-Using Durables: The Role of Time Discounting in Investment Decisions, 2011. (Other Publication)
Markets for energy-using durables seem to be characterized by an “energy efficiency gap”, the phenomenon that consumers could save on total costs if they bought high-efficiency products but often decide not to do so. This fact has been attributed to consumers undervaluing future cost savings relative to the upfront purchase price, possibly due to their high discount rates.
Factors influencing discounting behavior include the following:
1. Individuals’ rates of pure time preference, i.e. the rate at which future utility is ex- changeable for present utility
2. Uncertainty concerning product life, service reliability and future energy costs
3. Individuals’ limited access to capital markets resulting in liquidity constraints
4. Difficulties obtaining and processing information regarding future running costs
The objective of the current research was to develop a descriptive model of discounting be- havior which disentangles the effects of pure time preferences from other potentially decisive factors in the context of financial decision making and to test the model with novel experi- mental data. The data was collected from a representative sample of the German speaking Swiss population. We elicited discount rates, measures of risk aversion and other individual data relevant for decisions on energy-using durables. There were two different treatment groups: One group of the participants responded to hypothetical questions and received a flat participation fee, the other group was paid depending on their decisions in an incentive compatible manner.
The following results emerged:
1. We found a substantial incentive effect: People who responded to hypothetical ques- tions exhibited an average discount rate of 47.5% p.a., compared to 36.4% p.a. of the incentivized group. Model estimates show that there is no significant difference between groups’ preference parameters other than their levels of pure time preference. The incentive effect can be traced back to the behaviors of comparatively small subgroups of people in the hypothetical treatment who reacted strongly to two factors: skepticism about the certainty of future payments and liquidity constraints, both of which drove up discount rates considerably.
We did not find any evidence whatsoever that participants in the hypothetical treatment did not do their best to respond conscientiously and honestly. We conjecture that the incentive effect is due to people’s inherent difficulty of foreseeing how they will behave when they actually face real consequences of their choices. For this reason we recommend that the design of policy measures should be principally based on the analysis of real decisions.
2. Liquidity constraints are an important factor affecting people’s behavior in the incentivized treatment group. We estimate that discount rates are 40% higher for liquidity-constrained individuals than for unconstrained ones who exhibit an average rate of time preference of more than 30% p.a. The magnitudes of these rates suggest that there are considerable obstacles to investment in energy-efficient durables even for people with unlimited access to capital markets.
3. Participants reported to be concerned about uncertain future energy costs and to have difficulties with assessing monthly energy costs. Both factors may play a crucial role in people’s undervaluation of future energy cost savings. Product- and consumer-specific information on present values of expected running costs may help consumers in their decision making.
4. If our estimates of time preference rates are indeed manifestations of people’s innate preferences, information and education will most likely not alter people’s behavior. In this case, policy could influence relative prices of high-efficiency and low-efficiency durables directly via feebates, a combination of fees and rebates. This idea can be transferred to other aspects of the purchase decision, such as service, warranty and leasing contracts. In order to be able to quantify the relative magnitudes of fees and rebates, the extent of undervaluation of future costs will have to be assessed on a market-by-market basis. |
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Bruno Frey, Religiös, glücklich und nicht Kirchgänger, 2011. (Other Publication)
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The Observer's Fallacy: Why Anomalous Behavior May Be Rational, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Dissertation)
A large body of empirical evidence documents that people systematically violate the key axioms of the standard economic theories of choice over time and choice under risk. In response to the evidence, new models have been developed, incorporating hyperbolic time preferences or nonlinear probability weights. These models constitute pronounced departures from standard theory, and, as a consequence, are associated with several practical issues. They often fail at predicting more than one important empirical regularity and, hence, are not able to provide a unifying explanation for anomalous behavior in intertemporal and risky choice.
Motivated by these deficiencies, this thesis shows that environmental factors, such as liquidity constraints or inherent uncertainty, can bridge the gap between standard economic theory and effectively observed behavior. Anomalously-looking behavior may not necessarily be caused by exotic preferences, but can naturally arise from decision makers' rational responses to their environments. The predictions made by this approach dovetail nicely with existing empirical findings. Experimental data further support the theory's main conjectures and illustrate that it indeed has significant explanatory power. The results presented have important implications for the design of proper policy interventions and the state of standard economic theory in general. |
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Bruno Frey, Lasse Steiner, Alternativen zur UNESCO-Liste des Welterbes, 2011. (Other Publication)
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Slim Bridji, Fabien Tripier, Les apports des modèles d'équilibre général à l'analyse de la Grande Dépression : Une introduction à l'énigme de la productivité totale des facteurs., Économies et Sociétés, Série Histoire économique quantitative AF (43), 2011. (Journal Article)
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Jean-Charles Rochet, Charles Goodhart, Utvärdering av Riksbankens penningpolitik och arbete med finansiell stabilitet 2005-2010, 2011. (Studies and Reports Commissionned)
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Simon Andrea Meier, Wie öffentliche Informationen einer Konferenz organisiert werden können: Mikro-Rapportierung durch Twitter an der Wi_2011, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Bachelor's Thesis)
This theses shows different aspects how information can be organized at a scientific conference by using micro-blogging.
It researches the observed behavior of conference participants and the results of the organizational measures that can be taken in order to support the
discussion about the content of the conference. This new knowledge is gathered from existing theories, statistical observations and discussion with experts
in the field.
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Jonas Minke, Augmentation of the affinity diagram: searching for notes on the affinity wall, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Master's Thesis)
Searching through a large affinity diagram for a specific sticky note is not a simple task, especially because the process of the affinity diagramming still relies mostly on non-digital media such as post-it notes made of paper.
In this work, we present a new method of augmenting the affinity diagram by giving the user a device to search for post-its. This device allows the user to visualize in real time where the searched post-it notes are. Further, it allows the user to browse and to search the post-it notes database online. By making this device complementary to the actual practice, it does not force the users to use it. We created a prototype of this device and explored it in a fist evaluation phase how the users would use it during an affinity diagram process.
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Alex Junghans, Informationsverhalten von Reisekunden: ein Vergleich von Reisebüro und Internet, 2011. (Other Publication)
This thesis analyses travellers' information search behaviour. The comparison of internet booking and travel agency booking is looked at closer. For this purpose, a questionnaire could be filled out on the websites of two different travel businesses. The data were analysed with a statistics program called SPSS. The results reveal a multitude of relations. An important relation is the difference in information search behaviour of internet and travel agency bookers. Future research should examine information search behaviour in conjunction with other variables. |
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Ian Krajbich, Antonio Rangel, Multialternative drift-diffusion model predicts the relationship between visual fixations and choice in value-based decisions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 108 (33), 2011. (Journal Article)
How do we make decisions when confronted with several alternatives (e.g., on a supermarket shelf)? Previous work has shown that accumulator models, such as the drift-diffusion model, can provide accurate descriptions of the psychometric data for binary value-based choices, and that the choice process is guided by visual attention. However, the computational processes used to make choices in more complicated situations involving three or more options are unknown. We propose a model of trinary value-based choice that generalizes what is known about binary choice, and test
it using an eye-tracking experiment. We find that the model
provides a quantitatively accurate description of the relationship between choice, reaction time, and visual fixation data using the same parameters that were estimated in previous work on binary choice. Our findings suggest that the brain uses similar computational processes to make binary and trinary choices. |
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Rocky Lonigro, "AI-inspired Open Innovation": Crowdsourcing-Simulation mittels Multiagentensystem (MAS), University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Master's Thesis)
Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that changes the way organizations use the Internet to collect ideas, solve complex cognitive problems, and build high-quality data and knowledge repositories (e.g. Wikipedia) or even software (e.g., Linux) by self-organizing agents around data and knowledge. Many recent studies have highlighted the factors and the small sets of parameters that play a role when a large crowd interacts with an organization. However, no comprehensive simulation has yet been developed to incorporate all these parameters and potentially generate predictive power. This thesis, based on a multi-agent system, describes the development of a simulator named “CrowdSim”, for human crowds performing collective problem solving in a Crowdsourcing scenario. The simulator allows running sensitivity analyses of multiple parameters as well as simulating intractable interactions of complex networks of irrational agents. In addition, the modular and extensible way the simulator is built enables the user to increase the accuracy and predictive power when scientists gain new empirical insights. |
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Margit Osterloh, Bruno Frey, Variable pay-for-performance is a folly, Vox, 2011. (Journal Article)
As the bonus culture in the financial sector once again comes under attack, this column challenges the typical defence that banks need to pay top dollar to attract the best talent. |
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Samuele Zoppi, Online computation of up-to-date summaries in the Swiss feed database, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Bachelor's Thesis)
This thesis develops the up-to-date summary, an automatic approach to aggregate
histories of nutrient measurements in the Swiss Feed Database. Since measurements
are taken irregularly and are sparse in the time, a simple aggregation over the entire
history is not representative of the real world state. We fight this challenge by detecting
trends in history of measurements with a set of data fitting functions: uniform
fitting function, linear regression and kernel regression. The experimental evaluation
proves the scalability of our approach to aggregate the measurements of good and
bad quality data. Further, this thesis contributes to the development of the Feed
Database with the integration of the up-to-date summaries into web application and
with the import of the raw temporal data. |
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Andrea Kunz, Technologiekombination in der Anlageberatung: Integration von Tabletop und Tablet, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Bachelor's Thesis)
At the institute of computer science at the University of Zurich a project called "Bankberatung 2.0" was launched in collaboration with a major Swiss bank. The project aims to develop a software for a Microsoft Surface Tabletop which enhances banking advisory sessions. This theses examines the elements of the banking advisory process according to four dimensions (cooperation, communication, complexity and semi-private spaces) and tries to identify elements which may be outsourced to a second device, a tablet. The findings are tested in a trial advisory session with two consultants and eight customers. The procedure for the development of the tablet application is based on the Scenario-Based Development of Rosson and Carroll [2002]. |
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Yves Bilgerig, Word sense disambiguation with signal/collect, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Bachelor's Thesis)
Word Sense Disambiguation is an interesting problem in the field of Natural Language Processing.
This bachelor thesis presents a graph-based implementation of a word sense disambiguation
algorithm. Besides this, it would like to show that this algorithm combined with a part-of-speechtagger
would get better results. Unfortunately, the presented algorithm could not reach the baseline
set by others work. In the last section, possible reasons are discussed. However, a slight but
positive difference could have been shown in the algorithm using a part-of-speech-tagger. |
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Daniel Strebel, Making signal/collect scale, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Bachelor's Thesis)
The size of the indexable web, and other data collections structured as a graph, is growing at an exorbitant pace and undoubtedly exceeds the available memory resources of a single machine. This thesis presents a way that allows the Signal/Collect to process data sets that would not fit into main memory, by storing the elements of the graph on disk. It describes different back end solutions to hold the vertices and describes other measures that have to be taken in order to load large graphs on disk and execute algorithms on them. In the evaluation we show the effect of these optimizations and that on-disk storage allows processing a graph with one million vertices with only 500 MB of RAM. It is also shown that the on-disk version of a SSSP computation is considerably slower than a comparable distributed implementation and why computation times of an on-disk SSSP computation will not scale linearly with the graph size or with the number of worker threads. |
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Marco Fischer, Tactile information extraction from artificial ridged skin and its application in haptics for prosthetics, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Bachelor's Thesis)
Everyday manipulation of object involves a complex tactile sense system that is able to acquire rich information about objects and influence grasp control. Prosthetic hand wearers, that lost their tactile sense associated to the missing hand, are deprived of this information, thus encountering difficulties in efficiently manipulating objects in their daily activity. The restoration of the lost tactile sense for amputees wearing a prosthetic hand poses various challenges related to the design of interfaces that allow an efficient and rich flow of information between the environment and the prosthetic hand, and between the prosthetic hand and the user. Thus, main endeavors in haptic interfaces focus on developing tactile sensors or haptic devices in order to relay environmental information.
The focus of this thesis is to inquire on stable and efficient grasp during object manipulation. To this aim, in this thesis we took the following investigation courses:
1. We developed an artificial ridged skin and tested its potential to extract enriched information (force, slippage detection, slippage speed) from the interaction with a slipping object using one force sensor. The approach aims to offer high information bandwidth to cost ratio, as well as to reduce the complexity (energy, weight) of prosthetic hands. The evaluation of the artificial ridged skin was performed under theoretical and practical conditions.
2. We investigated tactile parameters (force, slippage speed, force and slippage speed) that can lead to optimal grasp during object slippage. The evaluation was performed in a psychophysical experiment with human participants in a combined real and virtual environment.
The results show that the artificial ridged skin is a promising tactile sensor for extracting information related to slippage. Furthermore, the results suggest that force and slippage speed feedback may enable an optimal reaction time and grip for overcoming slippage.
The study supports a better understanding of the requirements for stable grasp with prostheses. Additionally, the performance of the artificial ridged skin comes to propose the means of reaching a stable grasp. |
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Andreas Scherer, Guido Palazzo, The New Political Role of Business in a Globalized World – A Review of a New Perspective on CSR and its Implications for the Firm, Governance, and Democracy, Journal of Management Studies, 2011. (Journal Article)
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Andrea Ichino, Oliver Ruf, Guido Schwerdt, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, Josef Zweimüller, Does the color of the collar matter? Employment and earnings after plant closure, Economics Letters, Vol. 108 (2), 2011. (Journal Article)
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