Contributions in Merlin

"The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders supremacyndoes not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate andntransfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespreadncorporate scandals, the interests of top management and directors should be increasinglynaligned to shareholder interests by making the board more responsible to shareholders, andnmonitoring of top management by independent outside directors should be strengthened.nCorporate governance reform needs to go in another direction altogether. Firm-specificnknowledge investments are, like financial investments, not ex ante contractible, leavingninvestors open to exploitation by shareholders. Employees therefore refuse to make firmspecificninvestments. To gain a sustainable competitive advantage, there must be an incentivento undertake such firm-specific investments. Three proposals are advanced to deal with thisndilemma: (1) The board should rely more on insiders. (2) The insiders should be elected bynthose employees of the firm who are making firm-specific knowledge investments. (3) Thenboard should be chaired by a neutral person. These proposals have major advantages: theynprovide incentives for knowledge investors; they countervail the dominance of executives;nthey encourage intrinsic work motivation and loyalty to the firm by strengthening distributivenand procedural justice, and they ensure diversity on the board while lowering transactionncosts. These proposals for reforming the board may help to overcome the crisis corporatengovernance is in. At the same time, they provide a step in the direction of a more adequatentheory of the firm as a basis for corporate governance."

The traditional economic approach to tax evasion does not appear to be particularly successful in explaining the extent of tax compliance. We argue instead that a psychological tax contractnwhich establishes a fiscal exchange between the state and the citizens shapes tax compliance to a large extent. In that respect, a case study of Switzerland is useful because the small size of the cantons and their direct democratic political systems procedurally establish a close exchangenrelationship between taxpayers and tax authorities. In this paper, evidence is discussednon how tax evasion and tax morale in Switzerland evolved over time. In addition, the impact of economic, legal, socio-demographic, psychological and institutional factors on Swiss tax evasion is discussed.

Recently, the problems associated with the existing journal review processnaroused discussions from seasoned management researchers, who have also made useful suggestions for improving the process. To complement these suggestions, we propose a more radical change: a manuscript should be reviewed on an “as is”nbasis and its fate be determined in one round of review. The as-is review process shortens the time period from submission to final acceptance, reduces thenworkload of editors, referees and authors, provides frank author feedback to referees, and, most important, lets authors own all of the ideas in their publications.

In the television show Affari Tuoi a contestant is endowed with a sealed box containing anmonetary prize between one cent and half a million euros. In the course of the show the contestant is offered to exchange her box for another sealed box with the samendistribution of possible monetary prizes inside. This offers a unique natural laboratory for testing the predictions of expected utility theory versus prospect theory using lotteries with large stakes. While expected utility theory predicts that an individual is exactly indifferent between accepting and rejecting the exchange offer, prospect theory predictsnthat an individual should always reject the exchange offer due to the assumption of loss aversion. We find that the assumption of loss aversion is violated by 46 percent of all contestants in our recorded sample. Thus, contestants do not appear to be predominantly loss averse when dealing with lotteries involving large stakes.

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on reported satisfaction with life it is possible to assess these latter gains from matching. We introduce a two-equation ordered probit model with endogenous switching and study self-selection into government and private sector jobs. We find considerable gains from matching amounting to an increase in the fraction of very satisfied workers from 53.8 to 58.8 percent relative to a hypothetical random allocationnof workers to the two sectors.

Stylized facts of empirical assets log-returns include the existence of semi heavy tailedndistributions and a non-linear spectrum of Hurst exponents. Empirical datanconsidered are daily prices from 10 large indices from 01/01/1990 to 12/31/2004. We propose a stylized model of price dynamics which is driven by expectations. The model is a multiplicative random process with a stochastic, state-dependent growth rate which establishes a negative feedback component in the price dynamics. This 0-order modelnimplies that the distribution of log-returns is Laplacian, whose single parameter can be regarded as a measure for the long-time averaged liquidity in the respective market. A comparison with the (more general) Weibull distribution shows that empirical log returns are close to being Laplacian distributed. The spectra of Hurst exponents of both, empirical data and simulated data due to our model, are compared. Due to the finding of non-linear Hurst spectra, the Renyi entropy is considered. An explicit functional form of the RE for an exponential distribution is derived. Theoretical of simulated asset return trails are in good agreement with the estimated from empirical returns.n

Laboratory experiments are an important methodology in economics, especially in the field of behavioral economics. However, it is still debated to what extent results from laboratory experiments can be applied to field settings. One highly important question with respect to the external validity of experiments is whether the same individuals act in experiments as they wouldnin the field.nThis paper presents evidence on how individuals behave in donation experiments and how thensame individuals behave in a naturally occurring decision situation on charitable giving. The results show that behavior in experiments is correlated with behavior in the field. The results are robust to variations in the experimental setting, and the correlation between experimental and field behavior is between 0.25 and 0.4. We discuss whether this correlation should be interpreted as strong or weak and what consequences the findings have for experimental economics.

We analyse interethnic cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma when members of one group are unable to target punishment towards individual defectors from the other group. We first show that indiscriminate punishment may sustain cooperation in this setting. Our main result, however, is that the introduction of ingroup punishment in addition to outgroup punishment represents a better sanctioning institution in the sense that cooperative outcomes may persist in situations where outgroup punishment alone fails to induce cooperation. Our findings are consistent with historical evidence on the dynamics of interethnic conflicts.

An individual makes random errors when evaluating the expected utility of a risky lottery. Errors are symmetrically distributed around zero as long as an individual does not make transparentnmistakes such as choosing a risky lottery over its highest possible outcome for certain. This stochastic decision theory explains many well-known violations of expected utility theory such as the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes, the discrepancy between certainty equivalent and probability equivalent elicitation methods, the preference reversal phenomenon, the generalizedncommon consequence effect (the Allais paradox), the common ratio effect and the violations of the betweenness.

We consider a repeated stochastic coordination game with imperfect public monitoring. In the game any pattern of coordinated play is a perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Moreover, standard equilibrium selection argumentsneither have no bite or they select an equilibrium that is not observed in actual plays of the game. We give experimental evidence for a unique equilibrium selection and explain this very robust finding by equilibrium selection based on behavioral arguments, in particular focal point analysis,nprobability matching and over-confidence. Our results have interesting applicationsnin finance because the observed equilibrium exhibits momentum,nreversal and excess volatility. Moreover, the results may help to explain why technical analysis is a commonly observed investment style.