1,906 research outputs found
Stable marriages and search frictions
No full textStable matchings are the primary solution concept for two-sided matching markets with nontransferable utility. We investigate the strategic foundations of stability in a decentralized matching market. Towards this end, we embed the standard marriage markets in a search model with random meetings. We study the limit of steady-state equilibria as exogenous frictions vanish. The main result is that convergence of equilibrium matchings to stable matchings is guaranteed if and only if there is a unique stable matching in the underlying marriage market. Whenever there are multiple stable matchings, sequences of equilibrium matchings converging to unstable, inefficient matchings can be constructed. Thus, vanishing frictions do not guarantee the stability and efficiency of decentralized marriage markets
Ask questions, get sales : close the deak and create long-term relationships / Stephan Schiffman.
No full textIncludes index.v, 168 pages ;In Ask Questions, Get Sales, the author and sales guru Stephan Schiffman helps readers boost their careers to the gold-medal level by teaching them how to strengthen their questioning skills during the sales process. The premise is simple yet effective: In order to be successful, salespeople need to change their mindset from "need-orientated" to "do-orientated". The message of the book centers around six core "do" questions: What do you do? How do you do it? When and where do you do it? Why do you do it that way? Who do you do it with? How can we help you do it better? With this indispensable guide in their briefcase, salespeople will have information at the ready to score big sales over the short term and the long term
Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment Rates of Low-Skilled and Elder Workers in West Germany: A Search Equilibrium Approach
No full textApproach Author & abstract Download 16 References 1 Citations Related works & more Corrections Author Listed: Launov, Andrey ([email protected]) (University of Kent) Wolff, Joachim ([email protected]) (Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg) Klasen, Stephan ([email protected]) (University of Göttingen) Registered: Stephan Klasen Abstract In this paper we investigate whether the extension of the entitlement to unemployment benefits in the mid 80s can explain the increase in the unemployment rates of unskilled and elder workers in western Germany. To answer this question we estimate a version of the Burdett-Mortensen search equilibrium model and analyze how workers’ search behaviour responded to these reforms. We try both nonparametric and fully-parametric estimation methods and identify the cases in which the nonparametric approach cannot be applied. We find that the entitlement reforms are largely responsible for the increase of unemployment among unskilled workers
Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment Rates of Low-Skilled and Elder Workers in West Germany: A Search Equilibrium Approach
No full textApproach Author & abstract Download 16 References 1 Citations Related works & more Corrections Author Listed: Launov, Andrey ([email protected]) (University of Kent) Wolff, Joachim ([email protected]) (Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg) Klasen, Stephan ([email protected]) (University of Göttingen) Registered: Stephan Klasen Abstract In this paper we investigate whether the extension of the entitlement to unemployment benefits in the mid 80s can explain the increase in the unemployment rates of unskilled and elder workers in western Germany. To answer this question we estimate a version of the Burdett-Mortensen search equilibrium model and analyze how workers’ search behaviour responded to these reforms. We try both nonparametric and fully-parametric estimation methods and identify the cases in which the nonparametric approach cannot be applied. We find that the entitlement reforms are largely responsible for the increase of unemployment among unskilled workers
Essays on Information in Politics and Social Decisions
No full textThis thesis consists of two parts. The first part consists of two chapters. The second part has one chapter.
How does the information of citizens shape the democratic process? This is the question asked in the first part. Each chapter of the first part proposes a specific economic model and analyzes a particular dimension of this question.
Chapter 1: "Persuasion and Information Aggregation in Elections", which is joint work with Stephan Lauermann, analyzes the scope of persuasion of voters by interested third parties. How manipulable are elections by third parties who hold private information and can strategically release relevant information to affect voters' behavior. Examples are numerous: in a shareholder vote, the management may strategically provide information regarding a potential merger through presentations and conversations; similarly, lobbyists provide selected information to legislators to influence their vote. We show that a manipulator can ensure that a majority of a large electorate supports his favorite policy simply by releasing some additional information to the voters. Moreover, persuasion does not require detailed knowledge about the citizens, the precise distribution of their preferences or their previous information. With very little knowledge about these, a third party manipulates by sending out private signals randomly to the citizens. A numerical example shows that persuasion is effective in elections with as few as $ voters.
Chapter 2: "Voter Attention and Distributive Politics" studies how citizens paying attention to politics (or not) affects election outcomes, social welfare and its distribution. Demographic groups care differently much about different issues: e.g. older people care more about healthcare issues, while changes in education policy are more relevant to citizens with children. People that care more, pay more attention. We show that this attention effect shifts election outcomes into a direction that improves the overall welfare of a society. Elections often lead to outcomes that maximize a weighted welfare rule: the implicit decision weight of each voter is higher when he cares more about the issue voted on; however, less so when information is more cheap. In general, the decision weight is proportional to how informed the voter is. These results are important as they stress that information is a critical determinant of democratic participation. They imply that uninformed voters have effectively almost no voting power, and that elections are susceptible to third-party manipulation of voter information.
Taken together, the first two chapters shed light upon two general topics. First, political actors seek to influence the citizens’ opinions and behavior through propaganda, by the diverting of attention of the citizens, or by spreading false information, even more so in the digital age. How manipulable elections are through such informational tools? The first two chapters point out that the scope of manipulation is rather large. These insights may serve as a starting point for studying related questions, that, I believe, are highly relevant and deserve further analysis. The second broader topic this thesis touches upon is how the incentives of individuals shape their political beliefs. The second chapter points out that the size of the incentives matters since it affects the precision of people’s beliefs, and thereby their implicit decision weight in elections. Studying the interaction of incentives and political beliefs has a positive motivation: we have a very limited understanding on how people form political beliefs, let alone why beliefs differ so much. But it also has a normative motivation since it informs about the consequences of economic interventions that shape the incentives.
The second part of the thesis is devoted to the social dimension of incentives and their role for belief formation, taking a step back from the political environment, however. Much empirical evidence has shown that many people depart from maximizing their self-interest, if doing so benefits others. For example, people donate to charity (e.g. DellaVigna, List, and Malmendier, 2012), pay postage to return misdirected letters (e.g. Franzen and Pointner, 2013), and share wealth with strangers in laboratory dictator games (e.g. Forsythe, Horowitz, Savin, and Sefton, 1994). This means that these individuals' decisions are not sorely governed by their material desires, but also by "social motives". The recent research on motivated reasoning shows that many people deviate from complete egoism in order to `feel moral'(for a review, see Gino, Norton, and Weber, 2016). It argues that, in social decisions, individuals can behave selfishly without a guilty conscience if they can make themselves believe that the selfish decision harms no others (for a review, see Gino, Norton, and Weber, 2016).
In Chapter 3: "Motivated Information Acquisition in Social Decisions", which is joint work with Si Chen, we ask: when do people stop acquiring information before a decision where pursuing one`s own material benefits might harm others. Examples include medical examinations that help a doctor to decide between treatments with different profits, media consumption of voters before casting a ballot on ethically controversial policies, or consumers choosing to get informed about potential ethical issues of the products they would like to buy.
Using a laboratory experiment, we provide causal evidence that having a selfishly preferred option makes individuals more likely to continue their inquiry for information when the information received up to that point suggests that the selfish behavior harms others. In contrast, when the information received up to that point suggests that being selfish harms nobody, individuals are more likely to stop acquiring information. In some sense, individuals are fishing for excuses to behave selfishly until they find them.
We also provide a theoretical model, drawing on the Bayesian Persuasion literature Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011). The model shows that the information acquisition strategy documented in our experiment can be optimal for a Bayesian agent who values the belief of herself not harming others but attempts to persuade herself to behave self-interestedly.
Further, we empirically and theoretically provide results regarding the externalities that might not be obvious at first sight. Although one might think that strategic information acquisition must lead to more negative externalities when motivated by selfish interests, our model shows that also the reverse can happen: for some agent types, motivated information acquisition improves the welfare of the others affected by the decision. This counter-intuitive result rests on the observation that an "unmotivated" agent faces a moral hazard problem: when unmotivated, some agent types acquire only a small amount of information due to, for example, the satisficing behavior (Simon, 1955). The agent's selfish preference for one option over the other can mitigate this moral hazard problem by causing her to acquire more information in order to make sure that she chooses her least-preferred option only when certain that it is harmless to others. This result implies that delegating information acquisition to a neutral investigator might lower the welfare of the others affected by the decision
Measuring Vulnerability to Poverty Using Long-Term Panel Data
No full textMeasuring Vulnerability to Poverty Using Long-Term Panel Data Author & abstract Download & other version 16 References 4 Citations Related works & more Corrections Author Listed: Katja Landau (Georg-August-University Göttingen) Stephan Klasen (Georg-August-University Göttingen) Walter Zucchini (Georg-August-University Göttingen) Registered: Stephan Klasen Abstract We investigate the accuracy of ex ante assessments of vulnerability to income poverty using cross-sectional data and panel data. We use long-term panel data from Germany and apply di fferent regression models, based on household covariates and previous-year equivalence income, to classify a household as vulnerable or not. Predictive performance is assessed using the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC), which takes account of false positive as well as true positive rates. Estimates based on cross-sectional data are much less accurate than those based on panel data, but for Germany, the accuracy of vulnerability predictions is limited even when panel data are used. In part this low accuracy is due to low poverty incidence and high mobility in and out of poverty
Measuring Vulnerability to Poverty Using Long-Term Panel Data
No full textMeasuring Vulnerability to Poverty Using Long-Term Panel Data Author & abstract Download & other version 16 References 4 Citations Related works & more Corrections Author Listed: Katja Landau (Georg-August-University Göttingen) Stephan Klasen (Georg-August-University Göttingen) Walter Zucchini (Georg-August-University Göttingen) Registered: Stephan Klasen Abstract We investigate the accuracy of ex ante assessments of vulnerability to income poverty using cross-sectional data and panel data. We use long-term panel data from Germany and apply di fferent regression models, based on household covariates and previous-year equivalence income, to classify a household as vulnerable or not. Predictive performance is assessed using the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC), which takes account of false positive as well as true positive rates. Estimates based on cross-sectional data are much less accurate than those based on panel data, but for Germany, the accuracy of vulnerability predictions is limited even when panel data are used. In part this low accuracy is due to low poverty incidence and high mobility in and out of poverty
Evaluation of in-store processes related to returnable packaging services offered in grocery stores - the store management perspective
No full textAuthor Stephan LehnerMasterarbeit Universität Linz 202
Evaluation of in-store processes related to returnable packaging services offered in grocery stores - the store management perspective
No full textAuthor Stephan LehnerMasterarbeit Universität Linz 202
Essays in Collective Decision-Making
No full textGroup decisions are ubiquitous in democratic societies. They range from general elections, and referenda to voting inside various organizations such as political institutions, and corporate boards. The present dissertation consists of four self-contained essays that study the design of voting mechanisms in settings with multiple alternatives. The normative essays identify reasonable voting rules for different contexts. Methodologically, the analyses are theoretical, and mathematical. They build upon tools from microeconomic theory, and, in particular, game theory, and mechanism design.
The "one person, one vote" criterion is a principle that is central to democracy, but it is arguably with justification violated in certain situations, where the voters are asymmetric. Chapters 1 and 2 share the following overarching research question: How to assign voting weights to heterogeneous agents?
Chapter 1, Sequential Voting and the Weights of Nations, focuses on institutions of representative democracy such as the Council of the European Union, where representatives vote on behalf of groups of citizens of heterogeneous size. The chapter develops a model of representative democracy, and studies the design of welfare-maximizing voting mechanisms for the collective decision-making process involving representatives.
Chapter 2, Public Goods Provision and Weighted Majority Voting, considers the problem of optimally providing public goods, that is, non-excludable, and non-rivalrous goods. It analyzes the utilitarian voting mechanism for the provision of a costly public good. The voters are asymmetric in the following two ways: On the one hand, the asymmetry of the voters arises from heterogeneous distributions of the benefits of the public good. On the other hand, voters are asymmetric because of an unequal sharing of the costs of the public good.
Chapter 3, Committee Search Design, is joint work with Christina Luxen. Search processes in many organizations such as hiring procedures share the following two characteristics: The decisions are taken collectively by a committee via voting, and the committee evaluates multiple items simultaneously. The present chapter investigates sequential search by committee, where, in each period of time, K items can be sampled, and at least M out of N committee members have to approve an item in order to stop search. The focus of the chapter is on the design of the sample size per period, K.
Chapter 4, Optimal Voting Mechanisms on Generalized Single-Peaked Domains, examines welfare-maximizing voting mechanisms in settings, where the voters have generalized single-peaked preferences derived from median spaces as introduced in Nehring and Puppe (2007). These preference structures are considerably larger than the class of single-peaked preferences on a line. The general optimality result in the chapter is applied to the design of voting mechanisms for the provision of two costly public goods subject to the constraint that the provided level of the former good is weakly higher than the provided level of the latter good
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