an experimental study of truth telling in a sender receiver game a recent experimental study of cai and wang 2005 on strategic information transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis to evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying we show in a simple sender receiver game that subjects incurring in costs to punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the logit agent quantal response equilibria whereas subjects that do not punish liars after receiving a deceptive message play on the aggregate equilibrium strategies thus we can partition the subject pool into two groups one group of subjects with preferences for truth telling and one taking into account only material incentives

cournot equilibrium calculation in power networks an optimization approach with price response computation since deregulated power markets are very often oligopolistic ones efficient models that are able to describe strategic behavior of firms must be developed in particular transmission constraints can easily increase the opportunities of market players to exercise market power this paper presents a model that describes the firms strategic interaction based on nash cournot equilibrium when the power network is taken into account specifically this paper introduces a new iterative algorithm that explicitly considers how the production at a certain bus affects the whole network and consequently models the opportunities for the firms of exercising market power taking into account their ability to influence the composition of the set of constrained lines the theoretical basis of the method as well as a case study based on the central european network is included

back to the future rethinking auctions for renewable electricity support abstract the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of two main types of instruments feed in tariffs and quotas with tradable green certificates have usually been compared in the literature on renewable electricity promotion due to negative past experiences with a third instrument auctions this instrument has been broadly dismissed in academics and until recently also in policy practice however and based on an in depth review of experiences with auction schemes for renewable electricity around the world this paper argues that some of the problems with auctions in the past can be mitigated with the appropriate design elements and that indeed auctions can play an important role in the future implementation of renewable electricity support instruments around the world the paper provides a proposal for the coherent integration of several design elements

a coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy this paper proposes a coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy based on the coevolution of ecosystems technologies institutions business strategies and user practices within a multi level micro meso macro perspective this builds on and develops previous coevolutionary analyses of long term technological and industrial change and recent renewed interest within ecological economics on coevolutionary approaches previous work has analysed how the coevolution of technologies and institutions has led to the lock in of current high carbon energy systems and how the coevolution of physical and social technologies and business strategies has brought significant material and welfare benefits to the minority of the world s population living in industrialised countries the coevolutionary framework proposed here may be used to undertake 1 detailed empirical analyses at a micro meso level of the challenges relating to the innovation and adoption of particularly low carbon technologies 2 as a framework for analysing the multi level interaction of social and technological elements within potential transition pathways to a low carbon energy system 3 to assess the implications for economic growth and prosperity of a transition to a low carbon economy and 4 to assist in the development of more formal multi level evolutionary economic models

bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology for contingent claims valuation this paper presents a unifying theory for valuing contingent claims under a stochastic term structure of interest rates the methodology based on the equivalent martingale measure technique takes as given an initial forward rate curve and a family of potential stochastic processee for its subsequent movements a no arbitrage condition restricts this family of processes yielding valuation formulae for interest rate sensitive contingent claims which do not explicitly depend on the market prices of risk examples are provided to illustrate the key results in relation to the term structure of interest rates arbitrage pricing theory has two purposes the first is to price all zero coupon default free bonds of varying maturities from a finite number of economic fundamentals called state variables the second is to price all interest rate sensitive contingent claims taking as given the prices of the zero coupon bonds this paper presents a general theory and a unifying framework for understanding arbitrage pricing theory in this context of which all existing arbitrage pricing models are special cases in particular vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 ball and torous 1983 ho and lee 1986 schaefer and schwartz 1987 and artzner and delbaen 1988 the primary contribution of this paper however is a new methodology for solving the second problem i e the pricing of interest rate sensitive contingent claims given the prices of all zero coupon bonds the methodology is new because i it imposes its stochastic structure directly on the evolution of the forward rate curve ii it does not require an inversion of the term structure to eliminate the market prices of risk from contingent claim values and iii it has a stochastic spot rate process with multiple stochastic factors influencing the term structure the model can be used to consistently price and hedge all contingent claims american or european on the term structure and it is derived from necessary and more importantly sufficient conditions for the absence of arbitrage the arbitrage pricing models of vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 and artzner and delbaen 1988 all require an iformerly titled bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology

complexity and the character of stock returns empirical evidence and a model of asset prices based on complex investor learning empirical evidence on the distributional characteristics of common stock returns indicates 1 a power law tail index close to three describes the behavior of the positive tail of the survivor function of returns pr r x x a reflection of fat tails 2 general linear and nonlinear dependencies exist in the time series of returns 3 the time series return process is characterized by short run dependence short memory in both returns as well as their volatility the latter usually characterized in the form of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and 4 the time series return process probably does not exhibit long memory but the squared returns process does exhibit long memory we propose a model of complex self referential learning and reasoning amongst economic agents that jointly produces security returns consistent with these general observed facts and which are supported here by empirical results presented for a benchmark sample of 50 stocks traded on the new york stock exchange the market we postulate is populated by traders who reason inductively while compressing information into a few fuzzy notions that they can in turn process and analyze with fuzzy logic we analyze the implications of such behavior for the returns on risky securities within the context of an artificial stock market model dynamic simulation experiments of the market are conducted from which market clearing prices emerge allowing us to then compute realized returns we test the effects of varying values of the parameters of the model on the character of the simulated returns the results indicate that the model proposed in this paper can jointly account for the presence of a power law characterization of the positive tail of the survivor function of returns with exponent on the order of three for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity for long memory in volatility and for general nonlinear dependencies in returns

i m not a high quality firm but i play one on tv this article investigates the role of noise in a multidimensional signalling game a monopolist that offers a high or low quality product can signal its quality to consumers through its selection of price and advertising it is shown that when the advertising channel is noisy there is no separating equilibrium where the monopolist will simultaneously employ both signalling mechanisms advertising will take place only when price is uncorrelated to quality furthermore the noise complicates the process of consumer inference this enables a low quality firm to take advantage of consumer ignorance by partially mimicking the strategy of the high quality firm

altruistic versus egoistic behavior in a public good game this paper analyzes an evolutionary version of the public good game in which boundedly rational agents can use imitation and best reply decision rules several possibilities for both decision rules to be present in the population are considered i show that altruistic behavior might survive if switching between the decision rules occurs less often than the probabilities of errors in choosing a strategy and if local neighborhoods are not too small or too large

rational behavior and economic theory abstract nowadays it seems almost universally presumed that the fundamental characteristic of homo oeconomicus is his rationality we analyze the role played by the concept of rationality in economic theory and demonstrate that it is necessarily constrained to be an essentially contentless notion we show that the main body of economic theory is firmly grounded and that some contrasting approaches to rationality although leading to heated debates and vivid confusion have no fundamental significance for economics with a refereshed view on the essence of economics we argue that the principles of economic theory form an essential methodological guide for the emergent line of research based on the use of so called evolutive models

reinforcement learning in the el farol model abstract the paper applies the approach of reinforcement learning to arthur s american economic review 84 1994a 406 el farol problem where repeatedly a population of agents decides to go to a bar or stay home and going is enjoyable if and only if the bar is not crowded the numerical simulations show that the learning process is fairly efficient in that attendances tend to fluctuate around the bar s capacity on the other hand the shape of the long run equilibrium frequency distribution is usually quite distinct from the nash equilibrium solutions and furthermore rather sensitive to some of the model s specification details

strategies and evolution in the minority game a multi round strategy experiment abstract minority games are a stylized description of strategic situations with both coordination and competition these games are widely studied using either simulations or laboratory experiments simulations can show the dynamics of aggregate behavior but the results of such simulations depend on the type of strategies used so far experiments provided little guidance on the type of strategies people use because the set of possible strategies is very large we therefore use a multi round strategy method experiment to directly elicit people s strategies between rounds participants can adjust their strategy and test the performance of possible new strategies against strategies from the previous round strategies gathered in the experiment are subjected to an evolutionary competition the strategies people use are very heterogeneous although aggregate outcomes resemble the symmetric nash equilibrium the strategies that survive evolutionary competition achieve much higher levels of coordination

money talks an experimental investigation of cheap talk and burned money we experimentally study the strategic transmission of information in a setting where both cheap talk and money can be used for communication purposes theoretically a large number of equilibria exist side by side in which senders either use costless messages money or a combination of the two we find that senders prefer to communicate through costless messages only when the interest disalignment between sender and receiver increases cheap talk tends to break down and high sender types start burning money to enhance the credibility of their costless messages a behavioral model due to kartik 2009 assuming that sellers bear a cost of lying fits the data best

a historical review of promotion strategies for electricity from renewable energy sources in eu countries abstract the core objective of this paper is to elaborate on historically implemented promotion strategies of renewable energy sources and the associated deployment within the european electricity market hence at a first glance the historic development of renewable energy sources in the electricity res e sector is addressed on member state and on sectoral level as well as consequently discussed according to available res e potentials and costs the specific focus of this paper are promotion strategies for res e options as they are the key driver of an efficient and effective res e deployment therefore the paper depicts the main types of different promotion schemes and their properties additionally several cases studies of different european member states show an in depth analysis of the different res e promotion schemes in this context special emphasises are put on the question of effective and efficient promotion scheme designs of different res e technologies generally conducted research led to the conclusion that technology specific financial support measures of res e performed much more effective and efficient than others did hence it is not all about the common question of feed in tariffs vs quota systems based on tradable green certificates but more about the design criteria of implemented res e support schemes

generation capacity adequacy in interdependent electricity markets this paper deals with the practical problems related to long term security of supply in regional electricity markets with transmission constraints differences between regulatory policies and market designs in terms of generation adequacy policies may distort the normal functioning of the neighboring markets as well as the reliability of supply we test the effect of heterogeneous regulatory design between two interdependent markets energy only market price capped market without capacity mechanisms and price capped markets with forward capacity contracts obligation we rely on a long term market simulation model in system dynamics that characterizes expansion decision in a competitive regime the results show that differences in market designs affect both price and reliability of supply in the two markets we examine both the short and long terms effect and how free riding may occur where capacity adequacy policies are adopted in one market but not the other the main finding is that the lack of harmonization between local markets in policies to ensure capacity adequacy may lead to undesirable side effects

can neoclassical economics handle complexity the fallacy of the oil spot dynamic abstract this paper is essentially a rebuttal of the view that neoclassical economics can handle complexity i have coined the locution oil spot dynamic to denote the neoclassical ability to subsume each and every new perspective the main part of the paper is devoted to showing why the oil spot dynamic cannot work with the complexity approach which is seen as a coherent stand alone research program that stems from the sfi economics program and manifests itself with different nuances the fallacy of the oil spot dynamic is relevant in this period in which economists are beginning to realize that the neoclassical samuelsonian paradigm no longer represents the common language of their profession the spread of the complexity approach and the dissolving notion of mainstream are here interpreted as indicative of a changing economics a short foray into the features of the process of change completes my arguments by showing that the shift from one paradigm to another has many interrelated dimensions and that there may be rigidities internalizing changes

the impacts of multiperil crop insurance on indonesian rice farmers and production this article analyzes the effect of multiperil crop insurance policy for risk averse indonesian rice farmers located in tuban and gresik regencies of the east java province based on the model comparative static analysis of a change in policy variables coverage levels and premium subsidies on input use through the coupling wealth and insurance effects are presented the comparative static results are largely ambiguous and left as empirical questions consequently the model is numerically simulated to quantify the effects of different coverage levels and subsidy rates on input use expected net insurance payments and certainty equivalents the empirical analysis shows that mpci crop insurance results in a decline in expected yield for coverage levels above about 82 5 for both regencies furthermore higher subsidy rates amplify the reduction in input use and yield therefore incomplete coverage with relatively low premium subsidies is the best policy to minimize the impact on input use and yield however from the farmers perspective the optimal policy combination results from the highest coverage level and subsidy which offer the largest expected net insurance payments and certainty equivalent

pinocchio s pupil using eyetracking and pupil dilation to understand truth telling and deception in sender receiver games we conduct laboratory experiments on sender receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate such as security analyst s painting a rosy picture about earnings prospects our results show that overcommunicati on messages are more informative of the true state than they should be in equilibri um is consistent with a level k model eyetracking shows that senders look much more on the payoff rows corresponding to the true state and much less at receiver payoffs than at their own payoffs senders pupils also dilate more when their deception is larger in magnitude together these data are consistent with the hypothesis that figuring out ho w to deceive another player is cognitively difficult as assumed in the level k mod el a combination of sender messages and lookup patterns predicts the true state about t wice as often as predicted by equilibrium using these measures would enable receiver subjects to hypothetically earn up to 16 21 percent more than they actually do

moral hazard cycles in individual coverage crop insurance this paper examines the moral hazard implications of individual coverage crop insurance contracts individual coverage contracts are informationally superior to standard contracts because the farmer s coverage is proportional to his average historical yield despite this apparent benefit the steady state solution is shown to be characterized by moral hazard cycles where moral hazard is practiced in alternative periods the amplitude of the cycle and thus the variability in planned production is shown to be larger the lower the degree of production uncertainty the fewer the number of years used in the averaging process the higher the coverage threshold and the lower the level of co insurance

understanding carbon lock in abstract this paper narrative argues that industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co evolution driven by path dependent increasing returns to scale it is asserted that this condition termed carbon lock in creates persistent market and policy failures that can inhibit the diffusion of carbon saving technologies despite their apparent environmental and economic advantages the notion of a techno institutional complex is introduced to capture the idea that lock in occurs through combined interactions among technological systems and governing institutions while carbon lock in provides a conceptual basis for understanding macro level barriers to the diffusion of carbon saving technologies it also generates questions for standard economic modeling approaches that abstract away technological and institutional evolution in their elaboration the question of escaping carbon lock in is left for a future paper

explaining the diversity of motivations behind community renewable energy community based renewable energy initiatives may be important actors in the transition toward low carbon energy systems in turn stimulating investments in renewable energy production at the community level requires a better understanding of investors motives this paper aims to study the heterogeneity of motivations that drive individuals to participate in community renewable energy projects and the underlying explanatory factors behind this as well as the implications for their level of engagement in initiatives based on quantitative data from an original survey conducted with two renewable energy cooperatives in flanders the statistical analysis shows that cooperative members should not be considered as one homogeneous group several categories of members with different motives and levels of engagement can be distinguished this heterogeneity is explained by contrasts in terms of institutional settings spatial patterns and attitudes to the diffusion of institutional innovations regarding policy implications the findings suggest that this heterogeneity should be taken into account in designing more effective supporting policies to stimulate investments at the community level the activation of social norms is also shown to be a promising mechanism for triggering investment decisions although the implications of its interplay with economic incentives should be further explored

evolutionary dynamics in club goods binary games abstract a dynamic adjustment mechanism based on replicator dynamics in discrete time is used to study the time evolution of a population of players facing a binary choice game with social influence characterized by payoff curves that intersect at two interior points also denoted as thresholds so besides the boundary equilibria where all players make the same choice there are two further steady states where agents playing different strategies coexist and get identical payoffs such binary game can be interpreted as a club good game in which players have to choose either joining or not the club in the presence of cost sharing so that they can enjoy a good or a service provided that a participation threshold is reached at the same time congestion occurs beyond a second higher threshold these binary choice models can be used and indeed have been used in the literature to represent several social and economic decisions such as technology adoption joining a commercial club r d investments production delocalization programs for environmental protection existence and stability of equilibrium points are studied as well as the creation of more complex attractors periodic or chaotic related with overshooting effects the study of some local and global dynamic properties of the evolutionary model proposed reveals that the presence of the participation threshold causes the creation of complex topological structures of the basins of coexisting attracting sets so that a strong path dependence is observed the dynamic effects of memory both in the form of convex combination of a finite number of previous observation moving average and in the form of memory with increasing length and exponentially fading weights are investigated as well

rationales for technology specific res support and their relevance for german policy in order to achieve cost effective res e deployment it is often argued that technology neutral support schemes for renewables are indispensable against this background res e support policies making widely use of technology differentiation in remuneration settings e g across the eu are frequently criticized from a theoretical point of view however in this paper we provide a systematic critique of the technology neutrality concept as a foundation for designing policy support schemes in the res e technology field specifically the main objective of the paper is to scrutinize the arguments for technology neutrality and discuss three conceptual arguments for why technology specific support schemes could in fact help minimize the societal costs of reaching future res e targets we also briefly address different political economy concerns which could constrain the choice of cost effective policy support schemes and that have to be taken into account for economic policy advice for empirical illustration of the key arguments we refer to the case of german res e policy making the central conclusion from this paper is that technology specific res e support schemes may generate significant economic benefits particularly if technology markets work imperfectly and in second best policy settings with additional non internalized market failures

lobbying and asymmetric information informational lobbying the use by interest groups of their alleged expertise or private information on matters of importance for policymakers in an attempt to persuade them to implement particular policies is often regarded as an important means of influence this paper analyzes this phenomenon in a game setting on the one hand the interest group is assumed to have private information which is relevant to the policymaker whilst on the other hand the policymaker is assumed to be fully aware of the strategic incentives of the interest group to mis report or conceal its private information

a note on cheap talk and burned money abstract austen smith and banks cheap talk and burned money j econ theory 91 1 2000 1 16 study how money burning can expand the set of pure cheap talk equilibria of crawford and sobel strategic information transmission econometrica 50 6 1982 1431 1451 i identify an error in the main theorem of austen smith and banks and provide a variant that preserves some of the important implications i also prove that cheap talk can be influential with money burning if and only if it can be influential without money burning this strengthens a result of austen smith and banks but uncovers other errors in their analysis finally an open conjecture of theirs is proved correct

crop insurance in a political economy an alternative perspective on agricultural policy lawmakers often subsidize farmers in times of financial distress this article models this political impulse as a constraint on government farm policy describing how ex ante government farm insurance can deter ex post disaster relief and improve production incentives by countering the moral hazard that otherwise prevails absent ex ante government policy ex post relief takes the form of revenue insurance which prompts excessive entry into farm production and under production by operating farmers ex ante government policy can raise economic and political welfare by buying out low productivity farmers and offering profitable farmers a combination of revenue insurance price supports and a program participation fee copyright 2003 oxford university press

a folk theorem for minority games we study a particular case of repeated games with public signals in the stage game an odd number of players have to choose simultaneously one of two rooms the players who choose the less crowded room receive a reward of one euro whence the name minority game the players in the same room do not recognize each other and between the stages only the current majority room is publicly announced we show that in the infinitely repeated game any feasible payoff can be achieved as a uniform equilibrium payoff and as an almost sure equilibrium payoff in particular we construct an inefficient equilibrium where with probability one all players choose the same room at almost all stages this equilibrium is sustained by punishment phases which use in an unusual way the pure actions that were played before the start of the punishment

campaign spending with office seeking politicians rational voters and multiple lobbies abstract i introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office seeking politicians a continuum of voters and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework politicians use contributions to finance their electoral expenditures voters are not fooled by electoral expenditures they are influenced in a way that is consistent with the equilibrium behavior of lobbies and politicians the model is used to i determine the relation between campaign spending and the deviation from the median voter s preferred policy ii show the informational value of lobbies contributions iii evaluate the welfare implications of restricting campaign spending and iv interpret the empirical finding that campaign expenditures have a very low effect on election outcome although in equilibrium advertising provides voters with useful information under reasonable parameter values a ban on campaign contributions makes the median voter better off journal of economic literature classification numbers d72 d82 m37

gifts as economic signals and social symbols gift giving has often puzzled economists especially because efficient gifts like cash or giving exactly what a person asks for seem crass or inappropriate it is shown in a formal game theoretic model that gifts serve as signals of a person s intentions about future investment in a relationship and inefficient gifts can be better signals other explanations for the inefficiency of gift giving are advanced and some stylized facts about gift giving practices are described many of which are consistent with the signaling view of gifts

globalizing carbon lock in this paper extends the arguments surrounding carbon lock in elaborated in unruh energy policy 28 2000 817 30 2002 317 to countries currently undergoing industrialization it argues that for numerous reasons industrializing countries are unlikely to leapfrog carbon intensive energy development on the contrary carbon lock in may be globalizing and could further constrain climate change mitigation options it is then argued that many policy recommendations ignore carbon lock in possibly limiting their potential for successful implementation the paper then discusses four policy approaches that appear to have advantages given lock in conditions it is recognized however that relative ease of implementation does not necessarily equate with superiority instead it is merely a path dependent outcome of past development decisions pursuing policies on the basis of relative implementation ease may help address the issue of climate change but could also result in sub optimal outcomes along other dimensions of sustainable development

towards a comprehensive policy for electricity from renewable energy an approach for policy design abstract energy policy design in europe is a complex issue involving multiple levels of governance and heavily influenced by institutional contexts however policy design in europe and model based analysis even more so is arguably shaped by the neo classical school of thought there is a need to provide a structured approach that would facilitate the incorporating of institutional contexts into renewable energy sources for electricity res e policy design and analysis this paper presents a formal approach to res e policy design based on design theory the institutional analysis and development iad framework and agent based modelling and simulation given a certain frame of analysis we propose that it is theoretically possible to identify the complete policy design space a set of design elements crucially this aspect potentially opens up to the policy analyst new avenues for intervention and allows her systematically explore given a range of uncertainties which element s of intervention is are the most vital to achieve the goals of the community its empirical applicability is demonstrated by representing and differentiating between six res e schemes from western europe in terms of the design elements a model based illustration demonstrates the value of this approach to quantitatively analyse the impact of design elements

two moment decision models and expected utility maximization two moment decision models are consistent with expected utility maximization only if the choice set or the agent s preferences are restricted this paper identifies a restriction which is sufficient to ensure this consistency and confirms that it holds in many economic models the implications for economic analysis are then derived two different approaches to representing an agent s preferences over strategies yielding random payoffs are in wide use under the mean standard deviation ms approach the agent is assumed to rank the alternatives according to the value of some function defined over the first two moments of the random payoff while the expected utility eu criterion assumes that the expected value of some utility function defined over payoffs is used instead the fact that there are these two competing approaches has generated a considerable literature some authors are concerned with the advantages and disadvantages of each while others deal with conditions under which the potentially different approaches would yield the same results or at least approximately so space does not

coordination economies advertising and search behavior in retail markets we introduce a model of the retail firm in which consumers and active firms benefit collectively from coordination of sales at fewer firms using this model we show that ostensibly uninformative advertising plays a key role in bringing about coordination economies by directing consumer search toward firms that offer the best deals optimal consumer search takes the form of a simple rule of thumb that uses observed advertising information to guide search both industry concentration and social surplus are higher in the presence of advertising relative to a no advertising benchmark jel d83 l15 many observed advertisements seem to be at odds with rational behavior in a variety of ads mostly on tv and radio multiproduct sellers provide little hard information choosing instead to impart only vague slogans that are suggestive of good deals examples are plentiful a hardware store

cheap talk and burned money we augment the standard crawford sobel 1982 econometrica 50 1431 1451 model of cheap talk communication by allowing the informed party to use both costless and costly messages the issues on which we focus are the consequences for cheap talk signaling of the option to burn money and the circumstances under which both cheap talk and burned money are used to signal information

a global game with strategic substitutes and complements abstract we study a global game in which actions are strategic complements over some region and strategic substitutes over another region an agent s payoff depends on a market fundamental and the actions of other agents if the degree of congestion is sufficiently large agents strategies are non monotonic in their signal about the market fundamental in this case a signal that makes them believe that the market fundamental is more favorable for an action may make them less likely to take the action because of the risk of overcrowding

inter pattern speculation beyond minority majority and games abstract a new simple model of financial market is proposed based on the sequential and inter temporal nature of trader trader interaction and on a new simple trading strategy space in this pattern based speculation model the traders open hold and close their positions explicitly information ecology is strikingly similar to that of the minority game which suggest to reinterpret the latter as a model of synchronisation of predictability exploitation naive and sophisticated agents are shown to give rise to very different phenomenology

living in an imaginary world that looks real abstract in the paper we show using standard approaches general equilibrium modeling and the assumption of complete rationality that the macroeconomic environment is endogenous and is indeterminate specifically it is argued without resorting to sunspot type arguments that microeconomic fundamentals do not suffice to characterize the economy at the macro level in particular we show how perceptions of rational agents of the workings of the economy a shape the environment b affect the environment sufficiently to ensure that rational economic agents find the observed environment consistent with their beliefs even though it is not as a by product we illustrate that endogenous macro uncertainty can arise as an outcome if rational economic agents whose expectations are anchored on endogenous variables expect them to arise finally we show that systematic errors can persist indefinitely under rationality

institutional reform and technological practice the case of electricity this article proposes a framework for categorizing possible interrelations between technological and institutional change and applies this framework to the case of the restructuring of the electricity sector it is argued that there is a need for coherence between institutions and technological practice so as to safeguard the satisfactory functioning of electricity infrastructure the identification of possible incoherences between institutions and technological practice allows for a better understanding of the potential drivers for change and the evolutionary processes of which they may be part this article attempts to elaborate the nature of this co evolution in somewhat more detail using specific levels of analysis that are exemplified in a four level model in the case of the restructuring of the electricity sector the institutional framework has changed from a public utility oriented towards a market oriented system however the technological practice remained unchanged a system oriented approach that relies on centralized planning control and operation this discrepancy between institutions and technological practice leads to significant frictions in the functioning of the electricity sector but it also offers opportunities for innovation in order to make liberalization a success it might be necessary to stimulate certain technical developments i e distributed generation and intelligent networks

a model of learning and emulation with artificial adaptive agents we study adaptive learning in a sequence of overlapping generations economies in which agents live for n periods agents initially have heterogeneous beliefs and form multi step ahead forecasts using a forecast rule chosen from a vast set of candidate rules agents learn in every period by creating new forecast rules and by emulating the forecast rules of other agents computational experiments show that systems so defined can yield three qualitatively different types of long run outcomes 1 coordination on a low inflation stationary perfect foresight equilibrium 2 persistent currency collapse and 3 coordination failure within the allotted time frame

adaptive consumption behavior abstract in this paper we propose and study a theory of adaptive consumption behavior under income uncertainty and liquidity constraints we assume that consumption is governed by a linear function of wealth whose coefficients are revised each period by a procedure that places few informational or computational demands on the consumer we show that under a variety of settings the procedure converges quickly to a set of coefficients with low welfare cost relative to a fully optimal nonlinear consumption function

optimal sequential plantings of corn and soybeans under price uncertainty we examine crop choice and fertilizer applications as the solution to stochastic dynamic optimization problem for an innite stream of discounted prots the ecient decision rule depends on the stochastic evolution of commodity prices fertilizer prices and the agronomic eects of rotation versus monoculture this decision rule includes an account of real option values associated with maintaining soil quality and disposition in an environment with highly uncertain future prices and irreversible past planting decisions we parameterize a baseline model for a representative acre in iowa and compare the model s predictions and prots to relatively naive shorter horizon decision rules and a eld managed with optimal fertilizer applications conditional on corn and soybeans always being rotated we also examine the

bequests as signals an explanation for the equal division puzzle in the united states more than two thirds of decedents with multichild families divide their estates exactly equally among their children in contrast gifts given before death are usually unequal these findings challenge the validity of existing theories regarding the determination of intergenerational transfers in this paper we develop a theory that accounts for this puzzle based on the notion that the division of bequests provides a signal about a parent s altruistic preferences the theory can also explain the norm of unigeniture which prevails in other societies

editorial are consumers rational experimental evidence despite some misconceptions consumer rationality is a property of the researcher rather than the consumer consumers become more rational as we are better able to predict their behavior or other important outcomes influenced by their behavior perfect rationality results when we achieve accurate predictions consequently at least for many marketing science articles consumers are becoming more rational as we find better ways to predict however some experimental consumer behavior articles find the opposite the difference between experimental and statistical controls explains the divergence in conclusions experimental controls test rationality based on whether previously absent variables exhibit significant explanatory power holding known explanatory variables constant statistical controls test rationality based on the incremental explanatory power of previously absent variables after accounting for known explanatory variables moreover experimental tests tend to isolate consumer behavior predictions while statistical tests check for sufficient accuracy to choose among different firm strategies both perspectives are correct but ask very different questions

innovations externalities and the problem of economic progress in modern industrial societies innovativeness is seen as a source of economic growth and welfare increases following this assessment economic research presently focusses almost exclusively on the question of how to elicit innovations yet innovative economic activities have always also meant losses sometimes even hardship to some members of society and incalculable risks the present paper tries to develop a more balanced picture by acknowledging these less pleasant implications whether and under what conditions the permissive regime which modern societies have adopted towards innovations can be justified is discussed within the framework of a contractarian approach

technological revolutions and techno economic paradigms this paper locates the notion of technological revolutions in the neo schumpeterian effort to understand innovation and to identify the regularities continuities and discontinuities in the process of innovation it looks at the micro and meso foundations of the patterns observed in the evolution of technical change and at the interrelations with the context that shape the rhythm and direction of innovation on this basis it defines technological revolutions examines their structure and the role that they play in rejuvenating the whole economy through the application of the accompanying techno economic paradigm this over arching meta paradigm or shared best practice common sense is in turn defined and analysed in its components and its impact including its influence on institutional and social change

estimating the prevalence and cost of yield switching fraud in the federal crop insurance program producers who manipulate and switch their reported crop yields between separately insured units can increase their insurance indemnities substantially a statistical model that identifies potential yield switching is developed the unrestricted statistical model is singular and is identified by imposing a mixture of system estimable and system nonestimable restrictions lower bound estimates of yield switching fraud incidence and costs are obtained by applying the model to 207 067 multiple unit producers who purchased crop insurance in 1998

how vulnerable is the emissions market to transaction costs an abms approach abstract the impact of transaction costs on the early emissions trading market is examined by applying an agent based model and simulation abms approach for a realistic model set up bounded rationality stochastic characteristics and learning by doing are considered in our search processes marginal abatement cost parameters are obtained from yoo et al 2010 which is an experimental study on the emissions trading in the korean power sector sensitivity analyses are performed on market performance indices with regard to transaction cost parameters which represent scales and the learning elasticities of transaction costs a total of 960 simulations were run in this sensitivity analysis sensitivity analysis results consistently show that higher transaction costs worsen market performance the most remarkable finding in these results is that welfare performance of all the transactions decreases by up to 50 as the scale parameters of transaction costs increase implying that welfare gain from introducing emissions trading disappears significantly however with learning curve effect welfare performance could be regained by up to 26 in sum although transaction costs significantly encroach upon trade gains at the early stage based on our simulation results the welfare loss by way of transaction costs is lessened as the knowledge of market participants progresses

business model innovation in electricity supply markets the role of complex value in the united kingdom this research investigates the new opportunities that business model innovations are creating in electricity supply markets at the sub national scale these local supply business models can offer significant benefits to the electricity system but also generate economic social and environmental values that are not well accounted for in current policy or regulation this paper uses the uk electricity supply market to investigate new business models which rely on more complex value propositions than the incumbent utility model nine archetypal local supply business models are identified and their value propositions value capture methods and barriers to market entry are analysed this analysis defines complex value as a key concept in understanding business model innovation in the energy sector the process of complex value identification poses a challenge to energy researchers commercial firms and policymakers in liberalised markets to investigate the opportunities for system efficiency and diverse outcomes that new supplier business models can offer to the electricity system

the role of regulatory learning in energy transition the case of solar pv in brazil abstract an important problem that has attracted significant amount of attention within the context of energy transitions is the carbon lock in a situation in which energy systems are locked in to high carbon technologies through a path dependent process several measures to avoid the carbon lock in involve technology specific measures which in turn implies that those measures may result in an energy system locked in to certain low carbon technologies we consider that the brazilian system needs policies to escape the carbon lock in which are based on providing incentives to low carbon technologies we develop an analytical framework to analyze the role of regulatory institutions in the possible lock in to utility scale photovoltaic in the sense that they create barriers to the adoption of distributed generation photovoltaic we show that the definition of a process to adapt the institutional framework in a context of stress in the innovation system is crucial for the adoption of new technologies applying our framework to the brazilian power sector we observe that only when regulators consider the possibility that the system is locked in to centralized production technologies and not when they just consider the carbon lock in they manage to eliminate barriers to distributed generation based on solar pv

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

coordination through social learning in a general equilibrium model this paper analyses coordination through social learning in a general equilibrium model we use a fully decentralized economy in which households and firms exchange labour and consumption goods in the corresponding markets with potential rationing their strategies are updated through an evolutionary learning process based on imitation and random experimenting this learning process induces substantial coordination failures especially between firms which lead almost systematically to below equilibrium output levels and social welfare losses the main underlying mechanism is a self reinforcing uneven distribution of households income which results in a lack of aggregate demand

expectational diversity in monetary economies abstract we investigate an overlapping generations monetary economy in which expectations depend upon backward looking predictors of the future price level we use discrete choice theory to model how agents select a predictor based on its past forecast error letting the number of available predictors tend to infinity we obtain the large type limit of the system taking the large type limit dramatically reduces the number of free parameters while maintaining the expectational diversity which we argue is necessary for constructing plausible learning based models the model s dynamics are strongly influenced by the intensity of choice which measures how sensitive an agent s predictor choice is to differences in forecast errors across predictors when the intensity of choice is low the monetary steady state is stable as the intensity of choice increases and if certain parametric restrictions are met the system undergoes a hopf bifurcation in which case we document the existence of highly irregular equilibrium price paths

input use under crop insurance the role of actual production history the impact of crop insurance on changes in input use has attracted much attention by economists while there are a number of studies on this topic they frame moral hazard in inputs use in a static model however when agricultural producers are forward looking they would make input allocation decisions realizing that their decisions would affect their future actual production history this in turn affects the probability and size of future indemnity payments thus moral hazard should be framed in a dynamic input use decision model we first show theoretically that under certain feasible conditions a static analysis always results in lower optimal input use when compared to a dynamic one with endogenous actual production history this is because static models fail to recognize the role of actual production history we then run numerical simulations using nitrogen application rates as a case study we find that static models indicate significant reduction in nitrogen use compared to the no insurance scenario whereas the dynamic models with a role for actual production history indicate almost no reduction in applied nitrogen the dynamic analysis not only suggests a near absence of moral hazard but for low coverage rates it results in an optimal nitrogen rate higher than that under the no insurance scenario these findings illustrate the importance of recognizing the role of actual production history in mitigating moral hazard possibilities in crop insurance and the dynamic nature of moral hazard in crop insurance

fuzzy inductive reasoning expectation formation and the behavior of security prices abstract this paper extends the santa fe artificial stock market model sfasm studied by lebaron arthur and palmer 1999 journal of economic dynamics and control 23 1487 1516 in two important directions first some might question whether it is reasonable to assume that traders are capable of handling a large number of rules each with numerous conditions as is assumed in the sfasm we demonstrate that similar results can be obtained even after severely limiting the reasoning process we show this by allowing agents the ability to compress information into a few fuzzy notions which they can in turn process and analyze with fuzzy logic second lebaron et al have reported that the kurtosis of their simulated stock returns is too small as compared to real data we demonstrate that with a minor modification to how traders go about deciding which of their prediction rules to rely on when making demand decisions the model can in fact produce return kurtosis that is comparable to that of actual returns data

the pricing of revenue assurance a theoretical model to value gross revenue assurance under one of the popular proposals facing u s policy makers is developed the approach makes use of a fundamental paradigm of asset valuation and stochastic calculus because farm level gross revenue is not a traded asset equilibrium arguments must be made to specify the partial differential equation characterizing the value of the assurance an example solution is presented under the assumption of lognormally distributed gross revenue county level data for a variety of crops are used to examine empirically the pricing ability of the model

self organized criticality in a dynamic game we investigate conditions under which self organized criticality soc arises in a version of a dynamic entry game in the simplest version of the game there is a single location a pool and one agent is exogenously dropped into the pool every period payoffs to entrants are positive as long as the number of agents in the pool is below a critical level if an agent chooses to exit he cannot re enter resulting in a future payoff of zero agents in the pool decide simultaneously each period whether to stay in or not we characterize the symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium of the resulting dynamic game we then introduce local interactions between agents that occupy neighboring pools and demonstrate that under our payoff structure local interaction effects are necessary and sufficient for soc and for an associated power law to emerge thus we provide an explicit game theoretic model of the mechanism through which soc can arise in a social context with forward looking agents

toward a theory of agricultural insurance in this paper we develop a theory of crop insurance we start by reaffirming the risk spreading role of competitive crop insurance markets it is argued however that once the problems of imperfect information are recognized a competitive crop insurance market may not exist at all two candidates present themselves first is market insurance with the public sector as a source of costly information gathering and dissemination and second is the direct provision of crop insurance by the public sector we focus on the latter and develop a model of public insurance as a decentralized plan where the farmer determines factor utilization taking the insurance contract as given in turn the insurance agency taking factor utilization as determined by the farmer chooses the optimal contract so as to maximize the value of aggregate output in the economy

signaling future actions and the potential for sacrifice we consider extensions of games where some players have the option of signaling future actions by incurring costs the main result is that in a class of games if one player can incur costs then forwards induction selects her most preferred outcome surprisingly the player does not have to incur any costs to achieve this the option alone suffices however when all players can incur costs one player s attempt to signal a future action is vulnerable to a counter signal by the opponent this vulnerability to counter signaling distinguishes signaling future actions from signaling types

campaign advertising and voter welfare this paper investigates the role of campaign advertising and the opportunity of legal restrictions on it an electoral race is modeled as a signalling game with three classes of players many voters two candidates and one interest group the group has non verifiable insider information on the candidates quality and on the basis of this information offers a contribution to each candidate in exchange for a favorable policy position candidates spend the contributions they receive on non directly informative advertising this paper shows that 1 a separating equilibrium exists in which the group contributes to a candidate only if the insider information about that candidate is positive 2 although voters are fully rational a ban on campaign advertising can be welfare improving and 3 split contributions may arise in equilibrium and if they arise too often they are detrimental to voters

repeated insurance contracts and moral hazard abstract an attempt is made to account for the frequently observed phenomenon of insurance companies offering discounts to clients who possess a favorable record of past claims we argue that such discounts provide a mechanism which enables both insurer and insured to counteract the inefficiency which arises from moral hazard

insurability and moral hazard in agricultural insurance markets pareto optimal and constrained pareto optimal all risk insurance contracts are studied conditions required for emergence of competitive insurance markets are isolated and discussed full insurance contracts are shown to be dominated by contracts involving coinsurance and deductibles if insurers are pseudo risk averse the effect of moral hazard on all risk agricultural insurance indemnity schedules is examined results for indemnity schedules under moral hazard and constant absolute risk aversion show that providing farmers with the incentives to take appropriate actions may imply lower deductibles in the presence of moral hazard than in the absence of moral hazard

learning with fixed rules the minority game abstract this paper gives a critical account of the literature on adaptive behaviour in the minority game a simple congestion game the literature has proposed a model which differs markedly from many standard learning models in that players are endowed with a fixed subset of behavioural rules or response modes which map the observed history to actions these rules need not have a behavioural interpretation or be derived from some form of optimizing behaviour nonetheless this model gives rise to behaviour that is close to equilibrium behaviour at the aggregate level the individual level behaviour predicted by the model seems to capture some aspects of observed experimental behaviour that are difficult to explain using standard models

a tale of two market failures technology and environmental policy abstract market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies these combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives and can be cost effectively harnessed through the use of economic incentive based policy in the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives while environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties a long term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success

how to correct for long term externalities of large scale wind power development by a capacity mechanism this paper deals with the practical problems related to long term security of supply in electricity markets in the presence of large scale wind power development the success of recent renewable promotion schemes adds a new dimension to ensuring long term security of supply it necessitates designing second best policies to prevent large scale wind power development from distorting long run equilibrium prices and investments in conventional generation and in particular in peaking units we rely upon a long term simulation model which simulates electricity market players investment decisions in a market regime and incorporates large scale wind power development in the presence of either subsidized or market driven development scenarios we test the use of capacity mechanisms to compensate for long term effects of large scale wind power development on prices and reliability of supply the first finding is that capacity mechanisms can help to reduce the social cost of large scale wind power development in terms of decrease of loss of load probability the second finding is that in a market based wind power deployment without subsidy wind generators are penalised for insufficient contribution to the long term system s reliability

strategic communication with lying costs i study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed receiver and an informed but upwardly biased sender the sender bears a cost of lying or more broadly of misrepresenting his private information the main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment where the sender almost always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information regardless of the intensity of lying cost there is incomplete separation with some pooling on the highest messages the degree of language inflation and how much information is revealed depend upon the intensity of lying cost the analysis delivers a framework to span a class of cheap talk and verifiable disclosure games unifying the polar predictions they make under large conflicts of interest i use the model to discuss how the degree of manipulability of information can affect the trade off between delegation and communication copyright 2009 wiley blackwell

the reality game abstract we introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality which we call the reality game it is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes e g heads or tails in a coin toss depend on the amount wagered on those outcomes by varying the reality map which relates the amount wagered to the probability of the outcome it is possible to move continuously from a purely objective game in which probabilities have no dependence on wagers to a purely subjective game in which probabilities equal the amount wagered we study self reinforcing games in which betting more on an outcome increases its odds and self defeating games in which the opposite is true this is investigated in and out of equilibrium with and without rational players and both numerically and analytically we introduce a method of measuring the inefficiency of the game similar to measuring the magnitude of the arbitrage opportunities in a financial market we prove that the inefficiency converges to equilibrium as a power law with an extremely slow rate of convergence the more subjective the game the slower the convergence

evolutionary approaches for sustainable innovation policies from niche to paradigm fostering technological innovation is considered as an important element of policies towards sustainable development in the past 10 years evolutionary policy approaches have been increasingly advocated for several reasons they seem well equipped to underpin sustainable innovation policies they focus on dynamics of change and their drivers they allow for a substantive perspective on technologies beyond mere input output relations taking into account trajectories and different characteristics of innovation and they are able to describe circumstances under which established technologies might persist even when they are to some extent inferior to their new competitors lock in however the policy effectiveness of evolutionary approaches in cases in which radical or systemic changes are involved is not yet proven in this paper we assess the theoretical rationale instrumental aspects and the coping with policy constraints of three evolutionary policy approaches which have also been used in empirical studies strategic niche management transition management and time strategies each approach has its strengths and specific problems and all three have to be further developed and tested out but they hold promise for contributing to non incremental change with economic and environmental benefits by shaping processes of variation selection and retention with the outcomes feeding back into policy they may also be used in other areas in which innovation direction is important for instance health care or food

introduction to the special issue on agent based computational economics abstract a brief overview of agent based computational economics ace is given followed by a synopsis of the articles included in this special issue on ace and in a companion special issue on ace scheduled to appear in computational economics

behavioral heuristics and market patterns in a bertrand edgeworth game abstract this paper studies bertrand price setting behavior when firms face capacity constraints bertrand edgeworth game this game is known to lack equilibria in pure strategies while the mixed strategy equilibria are hard to characterize we explore families of heuristic rules for individual price setting behavior and the resulting market patterns through simulations of agent based models and laboratory experiments overall the individual pricing strategies observed experimentally can be represented approximately by a sales based simple rule in the experiments average market prices tend to converge from above and approach a state resembling a steady state with slow aggregate price variations and low price dispersion around an average near the competitive level however that configuration can be disturbed occasionally by excursions triggered by discrete price raises of some agents salient features of experimental results can be described by simulations where agents use sales based heuristics with parameters calibrated from the experiments the results obtained here suggest the existence of useful complementarities between analytical experimental and agent based simulation approaches

the aversion to lying abstract we experimentally investigate the effect of cheap talk in a bargaining game with one sided asymmetric information a seller has private information about her skill and is provided an opportunity to communicate this information to a buyer through a written message four different treatments are compared one without communication one with free form communication and two treatments with pre specified communication in the form of promises of varying strength our results suggest that individuals have an aversion towards lying about private information and that the aversion to lying increases with the size of the lie and the strength of the promise freely formulated messages lead to the fewest lies and the most efficient outcomes