Contributions in Merlin

When premiums are community-rated, risk adjustment (RA) serves to mitigate competitive insurers’ incentive to select favorable risks. However, unless fully prospective, it also undermines their incentives for efficiency. By capping its volume, one may try to counteract this tendency, exposing insurers to some financial risk. This in term runs counter the quest to refine the RA formula, which would increase RA volume. Specifically, the adjuster, ”Hospitalization or living in a nursing home during the previous year” will be added in Switzerland starting 2012. This paper investigates how to minimize the opportunity cost of capping RA in terms of increased incentives for risk selection.

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and that have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms — uniform and discriminatory price sealed-bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to tacitly or explicitly collude in order to maximize profits. Our main result is that the discriminatory and uniform price auctions produce greater revenues than the clock auction, both with and without explicit communication. The clock appears to facilitate successful collusion, both because of its sequential structure and because it allows bidders to focus on one dimension of cooperation (quantity) rather than two (price and quantity).

The N-firm Cournot model with general technologies is reviewed to derive generalized and unified conditions for existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Tight conditions are formulated alternatively (i) in terms of concavity of two-sided transforms of inverse demand, or (ii) as linear constraintsnon the elasticities of inverse demand and its first derivative. These conditions hold, in particular, if a firm’s marginal revenue decreases in other firms’ aggregate output, or if inverse demand is logconcave. The analysis relies on lattice-theoretic methods, engaging both cardinal and ordinal notions of supermodularity. As a byproduct, a powerful test for strict quasiconcavitynis obtained.

This paper describes subjective wage inequality and the demand for redistribution in Austrianusing individuals' estimates of occupational wages from the International Social SurveynProgram. Although these estimates differ widely across individuals, the data clearly show that most individuals would like to decrease wage inequality, relative to the level of inequality which they perceive to exist. The empirical analysis also shows that the demand for redistribution is strongly associated not only with variables describing self-interested motives for redistribution, but also with perceptions of and social norms with respect to inequality. Further, the demand for redistribution is a strong predictor for whether annindividual is supportive of redistribution by the state. On the other hand, however, I find almost no evidence for an empirical association between the demand for redistribution and individuals' party identification.

Digital video recorder proliferation and new commercial audience metrics are making television networks’ revenues more sensitive to audience losses from advertising. There is currently limited understanding of how traditional advertising and product placement affectntelevision audiences. We estimate a random coefficients logit model of viewing demand for television programs, wherein time given to advertising and product placement plays a role akinnto the “price” of consuming a program. Our data include audience, advertising, and program characteristics from more than 10,000 network-hours of prime-time broadcast television from 2004 to 2007. We find that the median effect of a 10% rise in advertising time is a 15% reduction in audience size. We find evidence that creative strategy and product category are importantndeterminants of viewer response to advertising. When we control for program episode quality,nwe find that product placement time decreases viewer utility. In sum, our results imply thatnnetworks should give price discounts to those advertisers whose ads are most likely to retain viewers’ interest throughout the commercial break.

Fund-of-funds (FoF) managers face the task of selecting a (relatively) small number of hedge funds from a large universe of candidate funds. We analyse whether such a selection can be successfully achieved by looking at the track records of the available funds alone, using advanced statistical techniques. In particular, at a given point in time, we determine which funds significantly outperform a given benchmark while, crucially, accouting for the fact that a large number of funds are examined at the same time. This is achieved by employing so-called multiple testing methods. Then, the equal-weighted or the global minimum variance portfolio of the outperforming funds is held for one year, after which the selection process is repeated. When backtesting this strategy on two particular hedge fund universes, we find that the resulting FoF portfolios have attractive return properties compared to the 1/N portfolio (that is, simply equal-weighting all the available funds) but also when compared to two investable hedge fund indices.

This note presents an algorithm that extends a binary choice model to choice among multiple alternatives. Both neoclassical microeconomic theory and Luce choice model are consistent with the proposed algorithm. The algorithm is compatible withnseveral empirical findings (asymmetric dominance and attraction effects) that cannot be explained within standard models.

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment on network formation among heterogeneous agents. The experimental design extends the Bala-Goyal (2000) model of network formation with decay and two-way flow of benefits by introducing agents with lower linking costs or higher benefits to others. Furthermore, agents' types may be common knowledge or private information. In all treatments, the (efficient) equilibrium network has a 'star' structure. While equilibrium predictions fail completely with homogeneous agents, star networks frequently occur with heterogeneous agents. Stars are not born but rather develop: with a high-value agent, the network's centrality, stability, and efficiency all increase over time. A structural econometric model based on best response dynamics and other-regarding preferences is used to analyze individual linking behavior. Maximum-likelihood estimates of the underlying structural parameters, obtained by pooling data from several treatments,nallow us to explain the main treatment effects.

Many countries simultaneously suffer from high rates of inflation, low growth rates of per capita income and poorly developed financial sectors. In this paper, we integrate a microfounded model of money and finance into a model of endogenous growth to examine the effects of inflation and financial development. A novel feature of the model is that the market for innovation goods is decentralized. Financial intermediaries arise endogenously to provide liquid funds to the innovation sector.nWe calibrate the model to address two quantitative issues. One is the effects of annexogenous improvement in the productivity of the financial sector on welfare and perncapita growth. The other is the effects of inflation on welfare and growth. Consistent with the data but in contrast to previous work, reducing inflation generates largengains in the growth rate of per capita income as well as in welfare. Relative to reducing inflation, improving the efficiency of the financial market increases growth and welfare by much smaller amounts.

Procurement auctions carry substantial risk when the value of the project is highly uncertain and known only to insiders. This paper reports the results from a series of experiments comparing the performance of three auction formats in such complex and risky settings. In the experiment, every bidder knows the private value for the project but only a single insider bidder knows the common-value part. In addition to the standard second-price and English auctions we test the 'qualifying auction', a two-stage format commonly used in the sale of complex and risky assets. The qualifying auction has a fully 'revealing' equilibrium that implements the revenue-maximizing outcome but it also has an uninformative 'babbling' equilibrium in which bidders place arbitrarily high bids in the first stage. In the experiments, the latter equilibrium has more drawing power, which causes the qualifying auction to perform worse than the English auction and only slightly better than a sealed-bid second-price auction. Compared to the two other formats, the English auction is roughly 40% more efficient, yields 50% more revenues, avoids windfall profits for the insider, while protecting uninformed bidders from losses.