is tiger woods loss averse persistent bias in the face of experience competition and high stakes although experimental studies have documented systematic decision errors many leading scholars believe that experience competition and large stakes will reliably extinguish biases we test for the presence of a fundamental bias loss aversion in a high stakes context professional golfers performance on the pga tour golf provides a natural setting to test for loss aversion because golfers are rewarded for the total number of strokes they take during a tournament yet each individual hole has a salient reference point par we analyze over 2 5 million putts using precise laser measurements and find evidence that even the best golfers including tiger woods show evidence of loss aversion jel d03 d81 l83

the effect of usage and size on tractor depreciation an econometric model was estimated to explain prices for tractors sold at auction tractor age hours of use size and condition were statistically significant explanatory variables real tractor depreciation most closely approximated a sum of the years digits pattern tractors sold at consignment and bankruptcy auctions brought a lower price than tractors sold by retiring farmers high levels of usage did not greatly reduce tractor value but tractors with low annual usage brought substantial premiums in the auction market

estimating farm equipment depreciation which functional form is best farm equipment depreciation has been the focus of research in economics and engineering for more than 60 years using data from 16 years of auction sales depreciation functions were estimated for 17 types of equipment including tractors combines swathers planters discs and trucks the box cox function did the best job of explaining variability in these various sales data bases and in forecasting prices in an out of sample data set nevertheless the much less complicated double square root and sum of year s digits functions performed nearly as well simplified double square root estimates are provided for practitioners interested in forecasting equipment depreciation

emotional bidders an analytical and experimental examination of consumers behavior in a priceline like reverse auction e commerce has proved to be fertile ground for new business models which may be patented for up to 20 years and have potentially far reaching impact on the e commerce landscape one such electronic market is the reverse auction model popularized by priceline com there is still uncertainty surrounding the survival of such new electronic markets currently available on the internet understanding user behavior is necessary for better assessment of these sites survival this paper adds to economic analysis a formal representation of the emotions evoked by the auction process specifically the excitement of winning if a bid is accepted and the frustration of losing if it is not we generate and empirically test a number of insights related to 1 the impact of expected excitement at winning and frustration at losing on bids across consumers and biddings scenarios and 2 the dynamic nature of the bidding behavior that is how winning and losing in previous bids influence their future bidding behavior

gender differences in a market with relative performance feedback professional tennis players abstract recent studies have found that females are less competitive than men these studies have all relied on a similar framework where individuals have little information about their relative abilities compared to other potential competitors it has also been found that performance feedback leads to more efficient choices for students and in experimental settings professional athletes competing in individual sports typically have access to performance feedback and good information about the quality of their potential competitors when choosing to enter competitive tournaments in this paper i use data from the international tennis federation itf on tournament entry decisions by professional players to study gender differences in tournament entry and preferences in this competitive labor market i find that even among this highly competitive population gender differences exist in performance and tournament entry in terms of performance i find that men exhibit a hot hand effect that can last for multiple periods while females are affected by only their performance in their last tournament this effect is obvious in tournament entry where both men and women are more likely to enter tournaments after doing well but women are affected by their last tournament while men s previous performance can affect entry beyond the next tournament the gender difference from feedback is more striking when taking into account whether individuals actually played in a tournament in that case higher ability females respond positively to performance from their last tournament while males do not but both genders see similar effects from previous performance in the short term and the effects are larger for worse ranked individuals thus in very competitive settings of same sex tournaments females and males respond differently to performance feedback information suggesting that information has very different gender specific effects for competitions and may be largely dependent on the length of time that has elapsed from the competition that the feedback is coming from

the effect of attending the flagship state university on earnings a discontinuity based approach abstract this paper examines the effect of attending the flagship state university on the earnings of 28 to 33 year olds by combining confidential admissions records from a large state university with earnings data collected through the state s unemployment insurance program to distinguish the effect of attending the flagship state university from the effects of confounding factors correlated with the university s admission decision or the applicant s enrollment decision i exploit a large discontinuity in the probability of enrollment at the admission cutoff the results indicate that attending the most selective state university causes earnings to be approximately 20 higher for white men

pay reference points and police performance several theories suggest that pay raises below a reference point will reduce job performance final offer arbitration for police unions provides a unique opportunity to examine these theories as the police officers either receive their requested wage or receive a lower one in the months after new jersey police officers lose in arbitration arrest rates and average sentence length decline and crime reports rise relative to when they win these declines in performance are larger when the awarded wage is further from the police union s demand the findings support the idea that considerations of fairness disappointment and more generally reference points affect workplace behavior

the dynamic capabilities of firms an introduction an expanded paradigm is needed to explain how competitive advantage is gained and held firms resorting to resource bas ed strategy attempt to accumulate valuable technology assets and employ an aggressive intellectual property stance however winners in the global marketplace have been firms demonstrating timely responsiveness and rapid and flexible product innovation along with the management capability to effectively coordinate and redeploy internal and external competences this source of competitive advantage dynamic capabilities emphasizes two aspects first it refers to the shifting character of the environment second it emphasizes the key role of strategic management in appropriately adapting integrating and re configuring internal and external organizational skills resources and functional competences toward changing environment 3 only recently have researchers begun to focus on the specifics of developing firm specific capabilities and the manner in which competences are renewed to respond to shifts in the business environment the dynamic capabilities approach provides a coherent framework to integrate existing conceptual and empirical knowledge and facilitate prescription this paper argues that the competitive advanis tage of firms stems from dynamic capabilities rooted in high performance routines z operating inside the firm embedded in the firm s processes and conditioned by its history it offers dynamic capabilities as an emerging paradigm of the modern business j firm that draws on multiple disciplines and advances with the help of industry studies in the usa and elsewhere

price changes maintenance and the rate of depreciation this study estimates rates of deterioration and depreciation for a sample of used privately owned single and twin engine aircraft over the period 1971 1991 the adoption of a strict liability stan

ever tried ever failed no matter on the demotivational effect of losing in repeated competitions abstract many important life goals require repeated confrontation with competitors losing in such competitions may discourage individuals and make them postpone further competitions thereby harming future prospects i use data on 44 799 amateur tennis players who are randomly paired in repeated competitions to study the causal effect of losing on the time to the next tournament participation results show that individuals wait on average 10 longer to enroll again after losing furthermore losing against relatively weaker opponents leads to a discontinuously larger effect than losing against relatively stronger opponents indicating that individuals do not rationally update beliefs about winning probabilities but instead use their ranking as reference point when evaluating defeats

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

the erosion of colonial trade linkages after independence high trade between countries with colonial ties may be explained by government policies that establish preferential access or as a consequence of networks formed through social interactions using bilateral trade data from 1948 to 2003 we examine the eect of independence on post colonial trade the severing of formal colonial relations can lead to an immediate reduction in trade as preferential access is eliminated as well as a gradual reduction corresponding to the deterioration of trading networks our results reveal that independence reduces colonial trade with its colonizer metropole the reduction cumulates over a 30 year period and the disruption is particularly severe for hostile separations we also find that overall colonial trade falls subsequent to independence but to a lesser extent than trade with the metropole

factor hoarding and the propagation of business cycles shocks this paper analyzes the role of variable capital utilization rates in propagating shocks over the business cycle to this end we formulate and estimate an equilibrium business cycle model in which cyclical capital utilization rates are viewed as a form of factor hoarding we find that variable capital utilization rates substantially magnify and propagate the impact of shocks to agents environments the strength of these propagation effects is evident in the dynamic response functions of various economy wide aggregates to shocks in agents environments in the statistics that we construct to summarize the strength of the propagation mechanisms in the model and in the volatility of exogenous technology shocks needed to explain the observed variability in aggregate u s output other authors have argued that standard real business cycle rbc models fail to account for certain features of the data because they do not embody quantitatively important propagation mechanisms these features include the observed positive serial correlation in the growth rate of output the shape of the spectrum of the growth rate of real output and the correlation between the forecastable component of real output and various other economic aggregates allowing for variable capital utilization rates substantially improves the ability of the model to account for these features of the data

vintage capital investment and growth abstract we study the dynamics of growth and investment in a continuous time model with vintage capital vintage capital models may be characterized by non exponential rates of depreciation and technical change and can incorporate gestation lags as well as learning by using we investigate the effect of such features on the dynamics of investment and growth and show how they can contribute to explaining the volatile nature of investment time series

maintenance and investment complements or substitutes a reappraisal a benchmark ak optimal growth model with maintenance expenditures and endogenous utilization of capital is considered within an explicit vintage capital framework scrapping is endogenous and the model allows for a clean distinction between age and usage dependent capital depreciation and obsolescence it is also shown than in this set up past investment profile completely determines the size of current maintenance expenditures among other findings a closed form solution to optimal dynamics is provided taking advantage of very recent development in optimal control of infinite dimensional systems more importantly and in contrast to the pre existing literature we study investment and maintenance co movements without any postulated ad hoc depreciation function in particular using impulse response experiments we find that optimal investment and maintenance do move together in the short run in response to neutral technological shocks which seems to be more consistent with the data

unemployment vacancies and the long term unemployed this paper is concerned with two related features of the labor market the ratio of long term to total unemployment r and the relat ionship between unemployment and vacancies the u v curve a model is developed to explain r in terms of the average probability that an unemployed person will find a job within a particular time period when the authors add the empirically confirmed hypothesis that this exit probability is lower for the long term than it is for the short term unemployed the n the model is consistent with the observed pattern of unemployment copyright 1988 by royal economic society

the evolution of price dispersion in the european car market car prices in europe are characterized by large and persistent differences across countries the purpose of this paper is to document and explain this price dispersion using a panel data set extending from 1980 to 1993 we first demonstrate two main facts concerning car prices in europe i the existence of significant differences in quality adjusted prices across countries with italy and the u k systematically representing the most expensive markets 2 substantial year to year volatility that is to a large extent accounted for by exchange rate fluctuations and the incomplete response of local currency prices to these fluctuations these facts are analysed within the framework of a multiproduct oligopoly model with product differentiation the model identifies three potential sources for the international price differences price elasticities generating differences in markups costs and import quota constraints local currency price stability can be attributed either to the presence of a local component in marginal costs or to markup adjustment that is correlated with exchange rate volatility the latter requires that the perceived elasticity of demand is increasing in price we find that the primary reason for the higher prices in italy is the existence of a strong bias for domestic brancs that generates high markups for the domestic firm fiat in the u k higher prices are mainly attributed to better equipped cars and or differences in the dealer discount practices the import quota constraints are found to have a significant impact on japanese car prices in italy france and the u k with respect to local currency price stability a large percentage of the documented price inertia can be attributed to local costs and a smaller fraction to markup adjustment that is indicative of price discrimination based on these results we conjecture that the emu will substantially reduce the year to year volatility observed in the car price data but without further measures to increase european integration it will not completely eliminate existing cross country price differences

capital maintenance and depreciation over the business cycle abstract this paper develops and estimates a stochastic general equilibrium model with capital maintenance which affects endogenously the depreciation rate of capital the estimate of maintenance series is found to track survey based measures for canada quite closely and to generate the procyclical pattern of maintenance observed in the data we use our model estimates to infer the time profile of equipment capital depreciation in canadian and us manufacturing the depreciation rate is estimated to be volatile and highly procyclical in both countries

capacity utilization and depreciation in use in this paper the effect capacity utilization has on the depreciation of capital goods is studied starting from a quadratic approximation to a normalized short run cost function expressions for the optimal rate of capacity utilization the demands for labour and energy and for investment are obtained investment is a function of past capital stock expected future capital stock expected future relative prices and expected future depreciation rates expectations are modelled via instruments the model is tested using us total manufacturing quarterly data depreciation dependent upon usage is found to be both statistically and economically significant

frictionless technology diffusion the case of tractors many new technologies display long adoption lags and this is often interpreted as evidence of frictions inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model we study the diffusion of the tractor in american agriculture between 1910 and 1960 a well known case of slow diffusion and show that the speed of adoption was consistent with the predictions of a simple neoclassical growth model the reason for the slow rate of diffusion was that tractor quality kept improving over this period and more importantly that only when wages increased did it become relatively unprofitable to operate the alternative laborintensive horse technology jel l62 n51 n52 n71 n72 o33 q11 understanding the determinants of the rate at which new technologies are created and adopted is a critical element in the analysis of growth even though modeling equilibrium technology creation can be somewhat challenging for standard economic theory understanding technology adoption should not be specifically once the technology is available the adoption decision is equivalent to picking a point on the appropriate isoquant dynamic considerations make this calculation more complicated but they still leave it in the realm of the neoclassical model a simple minded application of the theory of the firm suggests that profitable innovations should be adopted instantaneously or with some delay depending on various forms of cost of adjustment the evidence on the adoption of new technologies seems to contradict this prediction jovanovic and lach 1997 report that for a group of 21 innovations it takes 15 years for its diffusion to go from 10 percent to 90 percent the 10 90 lag they also cite the results of a study by grubler 1991 covering 265 innovations who finds that for most diffusion processes the 10 90 lag is between 15 and 30 years 1

dynamic capabilities what are they this paper focuses on dynamic capabilities and more generally the resource based view of the firm we argue that dynamic capabilities are a set of specific and identifiable processes such as product development strategic decision making and alliancing they are neither vague nor tautological although dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their details and path dependent in their emergence they have significant commonalities across firms popularly termed best practice this suggests that they are more homogeneous fungible equifinal and substitutable than is usually assumed in moderately dynamic markets dynamic capabilities resemble the traditional conception of routines they are detailed analytic stable processes with predictable outcomes in contrast in high velocity markets they are simple highly experiential and fragile processes with unpredictable outcomes finally well known learning mechanisms guide the evolution of dynamic capabilities in moderately dynamic markets the evolutionary emphasis is on variation in high velocity markets it is on selection at the level of rbv we conclude that traditional rbv misidentifies the locus of long term competitive advantage in dynamic markets overemphasizes the strategic logic of leverage and reaches a boundary condition in high velocity markets copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

estimation of r d depreciation rates a suggested methodology and preliminary application the 2008 version of the sna will recommend capitalization of r d expenditures to implement this recommendation measures for the stock of r d capital must be constructed and this implies a need to determine the depreciation rate of r d capital in this paper we develop a simple model based on a production function method that allows for monopolistic competition to estimate the annual depreciation rate of r d capital we treat r d capital as a technology shifter instead of as an explicit input factor both the r d stock and the time variable are used to capture technological progress modeling r d capital in this manner can better represent the role r d plays in economic growth estimated r d depreciation rates and markup factors are presented for the u s manufacturing sector and four u s knowledge intensive industries namely chemical products sic 28 non electrical machinery sic 35 electrical products sic 36 and transportation equipment sic 37

towards joint performance building dynamic capabilities for public critical asset maintenance this study aims to present path the joint performance how the build dynamic capabilities for public critical asset maintenance the study examined this by finding out the sand cone model and kano model content linkages to the 20 finnish largest municipality s council s action plans caps the study overall is based on a case study supplemented by the content analysis and the survey referring to the content analysis of finnish 20 largest municipalities previous and current council s decision making 2012 2013 a common strategic objective is economic continuity the case study explains the implementation to conduct multi focused strategies to the common order fulfilment process the dynamic capabilities conduct several strategic actions the study utilized critical factor index analysis to examine network partners the most significant contributions of the paper are the task of resource allocation to achieving multi focused strategic goals and an example how the task has been made of

matching and sorting in online dating using data on user attributes and interactions from an online dating site we estimate mate preferences and use the gale shapley algorithm to predict sta ble matches the predicted matches are similar to the actual matches achieved by the dating site and the actual matches are approximately efficient outof sample predictions of offline matches i e marriages exhibit assortative mating patterns similar to those observed in actual marriages thus mate pref erences without resort to search frictions can generate sorting in marriages however we underpredict some of the correlation patterns search frictions may play a role in explaining the discrepancy

long run implications of investment specific technological change an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the more traditional hicksneutral form of technological progress the balanced growth path for the model is characterized and calibrated to u s national income and product account nipa data the quantitative analysis suggests that investment specific technological change accounts for the major part of growth jel e13 030 041 047

a cross country database for sector investment and capital this article presents a new database of investment and capital in agriculture manufacturing and the overall economy it covers 62 industrial and developing countries for the years 1967 92 a common method is used in the calculations to facilitate comparisons across countries and sectors the sensitivity of the calculations to choices of parameters and estimation methods is tested collectively the data show that as economies grow capital stocks accumulate but the composition of capital changes together and individually capital stocks in agriculture and manufacturing constitute a smaller share of the total capital stock than they did 20 years ago capital labor ratios show that agriculture has become more capital intensive m most countries the composition of agricultural capital has changed as well capital from investments in orchards and livestock has declined relative to capital from fixed investments in machinery irrigation and buildings

does long term unemployment reduce a person s chance of a job a time series test long term unemployed are less likely to leave unemployment than short term unemployed to what extent is this due to an effect of duration and to what extent to heterogeneity on reasonable assumptions heterogeneity on its own with no duration dependence would imply that if over time the exit rate of new entrants fell by a given multiple the overall exit rate from unemployment should fall by the same multiple however over the last twenty years in the uk the overall exit rate has fallen by 60 per cent more than the fall in the exit rate of new entrants another test of pure heterogeneity based on more general assumptions also fails hence we explain the overall fall in exit rates from unemployment by the combined effect of 1 a fall in the ratio of vacancies to unemployed and 2 a higher proportion of the unemployed being long term unemployed and hence demoralized and stigmatized in the eyes of employers

empirical studies of depreciation this paper surveys empirical research on depreciation based on an econometric model of asset prices introduced by hall in 1971 and shows how hall s model provides a vehicle for unifying research on constant quality price indices and depreciation an additional objective of the paper is to illustrate the use of this research in constructing an integrated system of income product and wealth accounts a system of vintage accounts like that originated by christensen and jorgenson in 1973 is the key to successful integration

expectations as reference points field evidence from professional soccer we show that professional soccer players and their coaches exhibit reference dependent behavior during matches controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity we show on a minute by minute basis that players breach the rules of the game measured by the referee s assignment of cards significantly more often if their teams are behind the expected match outcome measured by preplay betting odds of large professional bookmakers we further show that coaches implement significantly more offensive substitutions if their teams are behind expectations both types of behaviors impair the expected ultimate match outcome of the team which shows that our findings do not simply reflect fully rational responses to reference dependent incentive schemes of favorite teams to falling behind we derive these results in a data set that contains more than 8 200 matches from 12 seasons of the german bundesliga and 12 seasons of the english premier league this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics