Research Seminars

We examine the relationship between information and price dispersion in the retail gasoline market. We first show that the clearinghouse models in the spirit of Stahl (1989) generate an inverted-U relationship between information and price dispersion. Past empirical studies of this relationship have relied on (intertemporal) variation in internet usage and adoption to measure the number of consumers that have access to the clearinghouse. We construct a new measure of information based commuter data from Austria. Regular commuters can freely sample gasoline prices on their commuting route, giving us spatial variation in the share of informed consumers. We use detailed information on gas station level price to construct various measures of price dispersion. Our empirical estimates of the relationship are in line with the theoretical predictions.

The Czech population is one of the most equal societies in terms of households' disposable incomes and has the lowest level of relative poverty in Europe. We ask if the Czech tax and benefit system helps to achieve this low inequality and poverty. We test this hypothesis with the best available data on households from the Czech Statistical Office - the Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC) for direct taxes and social benefits combined with the Household Budget Survey (HBS) for indirect taxes. We thus combine detailed data on household's income and expenditure for the first time. We show that market income, especially due to the inclusion of pensions, is quite egalitarian. We find that the narrowly defined tax-benefit system (direct taxes and social benefits) actually does not change the poverty rate, while the indirect taxes increase it. The Czech tax and benefit system thus does not seem to contribute to the one of the world's lowest levels of relative poverty and inequality. We further provide the first estimates of the redistributive effectiveness of a number of social and tax policies. Among other findings, we show that aid in material need benefits are the most effective in decreasing poverty gap and income inequality, while the child allowance is the largest benefit in terms of coverage of poor individuals.

We report the results of a simple statistical choice task based on independent and identically distributed (iid) variables. In our experiment subjects were asked to bet on the future performance of players in a coin toss task. Subjects exhibit a strong, irrational bias towards placing their bets on players with a good guessing history in the coin toss task. We also show that the result cannot be attributed to confusion induced by the BDM mechanism. Subjects' elicited preferences are compatible with prescriptive luck beliefs. That is, the idea that luck is a somehow deterministic and personal attribute.

The talk will explore quadratic hedging of derivatives in a complete and incomplete financial market. Starting with a discrete-time setting we will provide several numerical illustrations one of which leads to the famous Black-Scholes formula in the continuous-time limit . The talk is based on joint work with Jan Kallsen and Stephan Denkl of CAU Kiel.

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to analyse the effect that transactions costs and inertia have on charitable giving. We conjecture that transaction costs are likely to have a greater effect on donations if the solicitations are received when potential donors are busy (when the opportunity cost of time is high) as opposed to when they have time on their hands to donate (when the opportunity cost of time is low). If donations do not have to be made immediately, inertia could also become a factor as people might intend to give, but then postpone making the payment until they have more time, and having postponed making the donation once, keep doing so until the opportunity to donate has passed. We find that introducing a transaction cost to a standard Dictator Game with charity as a recipient, and manipulating whether the donation can be made when we know subjects have time on their hands, reduces donations providing evidence of a transaction cost effect. Some weak evidence is found that giving people more time to donate reduces donations, which is consistent with an inertia effect.

We investigate the extent to which lottery financing of public goods crowds out voluntary contributions driven by social preferences. On average, we find presence of such crowding out effect. We then classify subjects by the strength of their conditional cooperation and find that the extent of crowding out is increasing with the the level of conditional cooperation, especially under a higher lottery prize. We interpret this finding as crowding-out of voluntary contributions driven by reciprocity.

We investigate the trip scheduling behavior of Dutch train commuters, using data collected during a large-scale reward experiment with more than 1000 participants. Railway subscription owners were invited to join an experiment where they could earn (distance-based) monetary rewards if they traveled outside the (morning and evening) peak hours. A dedicated smartphone app was used to observe the trip timing and routing behavior of the participants. Compared to the pre-measurement, the share of peak trips decreased by ca. 20% during the reward period, and by 9% during the post-measurement. We estimate departure time choice models, drawing from multiple data sources to compute the attribute values for all choice alternatives. We are able to derive plausible revealed preference (RP) values for the participants' willingness-to-pay for reducing travel time, schedule delays, the number of transfers and crowdedness, and for increasing reliability.

We present a methodology for detecting manipulation of public procurement and evidence showing how policies that create discontinuous incentives to avoid transparent competition lead to manipulation and active waste by procurement officials. Our methodology exploits a natural experiment in which new discretionary thresholds in the anticipated value of procurements were established. Manipulations reveal through bunching of procurements below the new thresholds and affect 11% of relevant contracts. Manipulations lead to increases in the chance of allocating contracts to anonymously owned firms often related to corrupt behavior, increases in the final prices of procurements and preferential prices for anonymous contractors.