Contributions in Merlin

The purpose of this paper is to explain why some markets for financial products take off while others vanish as soon as they have emerged. To this end, we model an infinite sequence of CAPM-economies in which financial products can be used for insurance purposes. Agents' participation in these financial products, however, is restricted. Consecutive stage economies are linked by a mapping (“transition function”) which determines the next period's participation structure from the preceding period's participation. The transition function generates a dynamic process of market participation which is driven by the percentage of informed traders and the rate at which a new asset is adopted. We then analyse the evolutionary stability of stationary equilibria. In accordance with the empirical literature on financial innovation, it is obtained that the success of a financial innovation, a mutation, depends on a sufficiently high trading volume, marketing, and new and differentiated hedging opportunities. In particular, a set of complete markets forming a stationary equilibrium is robust with respect to any further financial innovation while this is not necessarily true for a set of incomplete markets.

We study the importance of conditional cooperation in a one-shot public goods game by using a variant of the strategy-method. We find that a third of the subjects can be classified as free riders, whereas 50% are conditional cooperators.

Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies and are designed to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries' workforces. Differences in the supply of skills create a mismatch between the requirements of these technologies and the skills of LDC workers, and lead to low productivity in the LDCs. Even when all countries have equal access to new technologies, this technology-skill mismatch can lead to sizable differences in total factor productivity and output per worker. We provide evidence in favor of the cross-industry productivity patterns predicted by our model, and also show that technology-skill mismatch could account for a large fraction of the observed output per worker differences in the data.

Rats explore their surroundings through rhythmic movement of their mystacial vibrissae. At any given moment, multiple whiskers are simultaneously moved and may contact the surface of an object. The aim of this work is to understand how simultaneous multiple-whisker deflections are processed in the somatosensory cortex. Arrays of 25 electrodes were inserted into the vibrissal representation of barrel cortex of adult rats. Multi-unit responses were recorded during (i) stimulation of single whiskers, and (ii) simultaneous stimulation of two, three or four whiskers of a whisker arc or whisker row. The whole-array response elicited by the simultaneous stimulation of multiple-whiskers (observed response) was compared to a multiple-whisker response predictor, defined as the sum of the whole-array responses to the separate stimulation of the corresponding single whiskers. The observed response to stimulation of four whiskers was nearly always less than the predicted response, indicating a sublinear summation of multiple coincident inputs. Examining the poststimulus time course of sublinearity, we found that the earliest cortical response to whisker deflection – reflecting the thalamocortical volley - was linear, whereas the successive cortical response was highly sublinear. This suggests a cortical origin of the phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that in the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) the mean Slutsky-income effect is positive if on average investors have non-increasing absolute risk aversion. Together with some lower bounds on the degree to which absolute risk aversion decreases with income this result will be shown to be sufficient for the uniqueness of CAPM-equilibria.

This paper proposes a new model for studying the new product development process in an artificial environment. We show how connectionist models can be used to simulate the adaptive nature of agents' learning exhibiting similar behavior as practically experienced learning curves. We study the impact of incentive schemes (local, hybrid and global) on the new product development process for different types of organizations. Sequential organizational structures are compared to two different types of team-based organizations, incorporating methods of Quality Function Deployment such as the House of Quality. A key finding of this analysis is that the firms' organizational structure and agents' incentive system significantly interact. We show that the House of Quality is less affected by the incentive scheme than firms using a Trial & Error approach. This becomes an important factor for new product success when the agents' performance measures are conflicting.

Obra que surge de la necesidad de contar con una referencia de fácil acceso a uno de los instrumentos de cobertura de riesgo cambiario más eficientes: la opción sobre la divisa. Esta versión, publicada originalmente en francés, ha sido actualizada y adaptada al caso latinoamericano, en particular al mexicano. El libro expone gradualmente, yendo de lo simple a lo complicado, las herramientas relacionadas con el riesgo cambiario, expuestas a manera de hacerlas más accesibles al lector, quien además podrá remitirse directamente a los anexos que contienen los aspectos técnicos y los métodos de valuación de las opciones más recientes.