Search results for "microeconomics"
showing 10 items of 442 documents
Unveiling the Role of Multiple blockholders: Evidence from Closely Held Firms.
2019
Research Question/Issue. This paper disentangles how the modes of ownership distribution among multiple blockholders and their heterogeneity shape principal–principal conflicts and, in turn, affect firm performance. The paper offers empirical evidence from a panel of Italian closely held firms over the period 2009–2014. Research Findings/Insights. We explore the principal–principal conflicts among blockholders across two distinct control structures. When a single blockholder controls the firm, principal–principal conflicts are shaped by the trade‐off between the alignment effect and the monitoring effect. In this scenario, we find that the relationship between the two largest blockholders' …
Operational and financial performance of Italian airport companies: A dynamic graphical model
2016
Abstract This paper provides evidence on the relationship within a set of financial and operational indicators for Italian airports over 2008–2014. The limited sample size of national and regional airports suggests to apply the penalised RCON ( V , E ) model, which falls within the class of Gaussian graphical models. It provides both estimate and easy way to visualise conditional independence structures of the variables. Moreover, it is particularly suitable for handling longitudinal data where small number of units and huge number of variables have been collected. Findings highlight that a qualified concept of size matters in determining good financial performance. Specifically, increasing…
Port expansion and negative externalities: a willingness to accept approach
2015
Port expansion has been seen as the origin of negative externalities, affecting local residents’ well-being and contributing to the poor public image of ports. In this study, the contingent valuation method is used to estimate the costs borne by local residents as a consequence of the negative externalities derived from the growth of the Port of Valencia (Spain) in the last 30 years. As transport project appraisal has become more complex, this technique complements existing methodologies in this field, such as the social cost benefit analysis and the multicriteria analysis. Given the perceived property rights of families that have been living close to the port for a long time, a willingness…
Deliberation favours social efficiency by making people disregard their relative shares: evidence from USA and India
2017
Groups make decisions on both the production and the distribution of resources. These decisions typically involve a tension between increasing the total level of group resources (i.e. social efficiency) and distributing these resources among group members (i.e. individuals' relative shares). This is the case because the redistribution process may destroy part of the resources, thus resulting in socially inefficient allocations. Here we apply a dual-process approach to understand the cognitive underpinnings of this fundamental tension. We conducted a set of experiments to examine the extent to which different allocation decisions respond to intuition or deliberation. In a newly developed app…
The many faces of human sociality: uncovering the distribution and stability of social preferences
2018
There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others' interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize heterogeneity across several dimensions of social preferences while still being able to predict behavior over time and across situations. We tackle this task with an experiment and a structural model of preferences that allows us to simultaneously estimate outcome-based and reciprocity-based social preferences. We find that non-selfish preferences are the rule rather than the exception. Neither at the level of …
Die Herausbildung von Zufriedenheits-urteilen bei Alternativenbetrachtung
1999
Traditional elements of competitive differentiation are declining. As industries and firms worldwide face increasing competition, slower growth rates, and price pressures, greater attention is being placed on customer satisfaction. However the research in satisfaction never consider alternatives, when customer satisfaction is formed. It has been the approach of this paper to present an extension for this circumstance. Therefor the regret theory, a diversion of the expectation utility theory, is used to explain the phenomena. According to this theory, each outcome has associated with it the evaluation of the difference between the outcome and the outcome that would have been received had a d…
Large scale and information effects on cooperation in public good games
2019
AbstractThe problem of public good provision is central in economics and touches upon many challenging societal issues, ranging from climate change mitigation to vaccination schemes. However, results which are supposed to be applied to a societal scale have only been obtained with small groups of people, with a maximum group size of 100 being reported in the literature. This work takes this research to a new level by carrying out and analysing experiments on public good games with up to 1000 simultaneous players. The experiments are carried out via an online protocol involving daily decisions for extended periods. Our results show that within those limits, participants’ behaviour and collec…
An Agent-Based Model of Extortion Racketeering
2016
Mafias can be considered as criminal organisations that are in the business of producing, promoting, and selling protection. Here, we describe the Palermo Scenario, an agent-based model of protection rackets aimed to deepen our understanding of protection rackets, and help policymakers to evaluate methods for destabilising them. Additionally, since the system is explicitly specified, we can use it to investigate the entire causal pathway from cause to effect: not only from actions to Mafia destabilisation, but also the intermediate actions along the path and actors' internal mental representations among the population.
Towards an Agent-Based Model for the Analysis of Macroeconomic Signals
2020
This work introduces an agent-based model for the analysis of macroeconomic signals. The Bottom-up Adaptive Model (BAM) deploys a closed Walrasian economy where three types of agents (households, firms and banks) interact in three markets (goods, labor and credit) producing some signals of interest, e.g., unemployment rate, GDP, inflation, wealth distribution, etc. Agents are bounded rational, i.e., their behavior is defined in terms of simple rules finitely searching for the best salary, the best price, and the lowest interest rate in the corresponding markets, under incomplete information. The markets define fixed protocols of interaction adopted by the agents. The observed signals are em…
Selling a vote
2005
Abstract A voting function is a rule that determines the outcome of an election: taking the voters' votes as input, a voting function selects the winning candidate from the set of candidates receiving some vote. A voting function is immune to vote selling when, given that neither voter i nor voter j votes for the winning candidate, a change ceteris paribus in i's vote cannot make the candidate for which j votes the winner. It is shown that voting functions immune to vote selling have either a dictator (a voter who always determines the winning candidate) or a dictated candidate (a candidate who becomes the winner by just receiving some vote).