Search results for "Incentive"
showing 10 items of 297 documents
How Electoral Institutions Change the Influence of World Trade Integration on Trade Policies
2014
World integration levels influence opportunity costs of maintaining restrictive national trade policies. In an integrated world, restrictive trade policies are more costly than in a context of low overall levels of world market integration. We argue that policy makers can be expected to react to these varying incentives to liberalize the trade regimes of their countries, yet do so not in a uniform fashion across countries. Rather, the responsiveness to changes in levels of world trade integration is conditional upon the electoral system the country in question employs. This is due to the fact that opportunity cost considerations increase in importance with a) the degree to which policy make…
Between commodification and altruism: gender imbalance and attitudes towards organ donation. A representative survey of the German community
2008
The German transplant law (TGP) of 1997 only recognises organ donation if the donor agrees (‘extended consent’) and if done for altruistic reasons. Several alternatives will be discussed here, including incentives and passive agreement. Based upon a representative survey, the authors examined the attitudes of Germans towards several European models of organ donation and their attitude towards organ donation in general whilst living and after death. The acceptance of possible compensation systems was also explored. In Germany the majority do not favour compensation systems, but rather passive agreement. There is evidence of gender difference with respect to this attitude. Men tend to favour …
Credit risk and efficiency in the European banking system: A three-stage analysis
2002
Increased competition and the attempts of European banks to increase their presence in other markets may have affected the efficiency and credit risk in the banking system. The first aspect is the incentive in reducing costs in order to gain in competitiveness. The second is associated with their lack of knowledge of such markets and/ or acceptance of a higher risk in order to increase their market share. Despite the importance of these aspects, banking literature has usually analysed the effects of competition on the efficiency of banking systems without considering these aspects. The few studies that attempt to obtain risk adjusted efficiency measures do not consider that part of the risk…
Patents, Competition, and Firms’ Innovation Incentives
2014
This paper presents fresh evidence on the interaction between industrial property rights (patents) and competition, and their joint effect on firms’ innovation. We use panel data of Spanish manufacturing firms for 1990–2006, as well as external information on European Patent Office and US Patent Office patent counts. We construct a new synthetic measure of competition and estimate the impact of patents on this measure at the industry level. Then, the effect of industry-wide competition and patenting on firms’ innovation is estimated at the firm level. Our results suggest that patents reduce the level of competition in the industry, whereas the effect of competition on innovation varies with…
Goalkeeper: A Zero-Sum Exergame for Motivating Physical Activity
2021
Incentives and peer competition have so far been employed independently for increasing physical activity. In this paper, we introduce Goalkeeper, a mobile application that utilizes deposit contracts for motivating physical activity in group settings. Goalkeeper enables one to set up a physical exercise challenge with a group of peers that deposit a fixed amount of money for participating. If a peer fails to complete the challenge, Goalkeeper redistributes their deposit to those who managed to complete it (i.e., zero-sum game). We evaluated the potential of Goalkeeper in increasing physical activity with a total of 50 participants over the course of 2 months. Our findings suggest that deposi…
Anatomy of Cartel Contracts
2013
We study cartel contracts using data on 18 contract clauses of 109 legal Finnish manufacturing cartels. One third of the clauses relate to raising profits; the others deal with instability through incentive compatibility, cartel organization, or external threats. Cartels use three main approaches to raise profits: Price, market allocation, and specialization. These appear to be substitutes. Choosing one has implications on how cartels deal with instability. Simplifying, we find that large cartels agree on prices, cartels in homogenous goods industries allocate markets, and small cartels avoid competition through specialization.
Online Pricing via Stackelberg and Incentive Games in a Micro-Grid
2019
This paper deals with the analysis and design of online pricing mechanisms in micro-grids. Two cases are studied in which the market layer is modeled as an open-loop and closed-loop dynamical system respectively. In the case of open-loop market dynamics, the price is generated as equilibrium price of a Stackelberg game with an incentive strategy. In such Stackelberg game, the leader is the energy supplier, the follower is the consumer, and the leader plays an incentive strategy. In the case of closed-loop market dynamics, the price is obtained as a function of the power supplied and the demand. A stability analysis is provided for both cases, which sheds light on the transient and steady-st…
Collusion constrained equilibrium
2018
We study collusion within groups in non-cooperative games. The primitives are the preferences of the players, their assignment to non-overlapping groups and the goals of the groups. Our notion of collusion is that a group coordinates the play of its members among different incentive compatible plans to best achieve its goals. Unfortunately, equilibria that meet this requirement need not exist. We instead introduce the weaker notion of collusion constrained equilibrium. This allows groups to put positive probability on alternatives that are suboptimal for the group in certain razor's edge cases where the set of incentive compatible plans changes discontinuously. These collusion constrained e…
Goal Setting and Monetary Incentives: When Large Stakes Are Not Enough
2012
The aim of this paper is to test the effectiveness of wage-irrelevant goal setting policies in a laboratory environment. In our design, managers can assign a goal to their workers by setting a certain level of performance on the work task. We establish our theoretical conjectures by developing a model in which assigned goals act as reference points to workers’ intrinsic motivation. Consistent with our model, we find that managers set goals which are challenging but attainable for an average-ability worker. Workers respond to these goals by increasing effort, performance and by decreasing on-the-job leisure activities with respect to the no-goal setting baseline. Finally, we study the intera…
Ecological Efficiency of Voluntary Conservation of Boreal-Forest Biodiversity
2008
Current networks of protected areas are biased in many countries toward landscapes of low productivity. Voluntary conservation incentives have been suggested as a socially acceptable way to supplement existing networks with more productive, privately owned areas of high priority for nature conservation. The limited resources committed to nature conservation demand cost-efficiency. Efficiency, however, depends not only on costs incurred to society from alternative ways of maintaining biodiversity but also on ecological values that can be captured. We examined the ecological efficiency of the new market-based voluntary program to preserve forest habitats on private land in southwestern Finlan…