New relationships are often plagued with uncertainty because one of the players has some private information about her "type". The reputation literature has shown that equilibria that reveal this private information typically involve breach of trust and conflict. But are these inevitable for equilibrium learning? I analyze self-enforcing relationships where one party is privately informed about her time preferences. I show that there always exist honest reputation equilibria, which fully reveal information and support cooperation without breach or conflict. I compare these to dishonest reputation equilibria from several perspectives. My results are applicable to a broad class of repeated games.

The erosion damage to stator and rotor blades associated with flow containing particulates in turbines is investigated. The main parameters studied are blade leading edge thickness, blade turning angle, turbine inlet temperature, particle size, and particle densities. The computer programs used in the investigation are based on inviscid flow theory. Flow velocities relative to blades ranged up to sonic values. Results predict that decreasing flow turning angles and increasing blade leading edge thicknesses are the most effective ways to reduce erosion damage caused by impacting particles. Decreasing particle sizes and densities can also significantly reduce erosion rates. The erosion model uses the brittle and ductile mode response exhibited by materials subjected to particle impacts to predict the total erosion damage. The accuracy for small (1 micron) particles is questionable since some of these particles will have long residence times in the boundary layers, causing deposition rather than erosion. / Master of Science

The effect of normal load, contact velocity, and dwell time on the coefficient of adhesion at slip in braking was investigated. A test rig that simulated locomotive wheel/rail interactions was used for the experimentation. The results indicated a drop in the coefficient of adhesion with increasing speed. However, normal load, contact velocity, and dwell time, as operating variables, did not have any effect on the variation of the coefficient of adhesion. A description of the investigation and recommendations for further studies is included. / Master of Science

Out of a total of 2,976 double tax agreements (DTAs), some 60% are signed between a developing and a developed economy. As DTAs shift taxing rights from capital importing to capital exporting countries, the prior would incur a loss. We demonstrate in a theoretical model that in a deal one country does not trump the other, but that the deal must be mutually beneficial. In the case of an asymmetric DTA, this requires compensation from the capital exporting country to the capital importing country. We provide empirical evidence that such compensation is indeed paid, for instance in the form of bilateral official development assistance, which increases on average by six million US$ in the year of the signature of a DTA. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This paper analyzes the link between relative market value of representative subsets of athletes in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and individual wages. NBA athletes are categorized with respect to multiple performance characteristics utilizing the k-means algorithm to cluster observations and a group's market value is calculated by averaging real annual salaries. Employing GMM estimation techniques to a dynamic wage equation, we find a statistically significant and positive effect of one-period lagged relative market value of an athlete's representative cluster on individual wages after controlling for past individual performance. This finding is consistent with the theory of prototype heuristic, introduced by Kahneman and Frederick (2002), that NBA teams' judgment about an athlete's future performance is based on a comparison of the player to a prototype group consisting of other but comparable athletes. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This article investigates the impacts of asymmetric information within a Lucas (1978) asset pricing economy. Asymmetry enters via the assumption that one group of agents is equipped with superior information about the dividend process. The agents maximize their lifetime utility of the underlying consumption process obtained from the agents' budget constraints, where the agents have the opportunity to invest in a risk asset to transfer income from the current to future periods. Since a closed form solution for the market price cannot be derived analytically, projection methods are applied, as described in Judd (1998), to approximate the expectation integrals in the agents' Euler equation. We derive the result that the informed trader only clearly improves his situation as compared to the non-trade situation if the uninformed trader only observes his own endowment but not the endowment of the informed trader. In the case where agents observe each others' endowment trade never results in a Pareto improvement. (auhtor's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

Al momento de presentar los pliegos en una licitación, los contratistas saben que pueden existir renegociaciones en los contratos. Si anticipan que ciertas cantidades estimadas por el ingeniero han sido sub-estimadas (o sobre-estimadas), pueden tener incentivos a desbalancear estratégicamente los precios ofertados con el fin de aumentar los beneficios del proyecto. Se desarrolla un modelo que incorpora este comportamiento estratégico suponiendo que los contratistas son neutrales al riesgo y se lo contrasta usando los contratos de construcción del departamento de transporte de Michigan para el período 2001-2013. Se encuentra evidencia empírica de que los contratistas desbalancean estratégicamente sus precios y obtienen ingresos 1.6% adicionales a nivel de proyecto. Además, los contratistas con mayor participación en el mercado de licitaciones son quienes lo realizan de manera más agresiva. Por último, se desarrolla de manera teórica un segundo modelo que considera que los contratistas son aversos al riesgo y tienen heterogeneidad en los costos.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T17:18:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo8468_1.pdf: 2039544 bytes, checksum: 0b095bf302ff0683000a9c9bbea879d7 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / O presente trabalho faz uma exploração dos mais importantes mercados financeiros e monetários no Brasil sob a ótica de simulações nas taxas de juros da economia e é composto por três estudos. No primeiro estudo foi analisado como são formadas as taxas de juros e os spreads que incidem sobre os cartões de pagamentos, em especial sobre os cartões de crédito no Brasil. No segundo, foram desenvolvidos aspectos microeconômicos do problema de racionamento de crédito e foi analisado como os bancos comerciais, numa atitude racional de maximizar seus lucros esperados, aumentaram sua aversão ao risco em relação às operações de financiamentos destinadas às indústrias. No terceiro e último estudo, foi realizada uma abordagem macroeconômica de política monetária no Brasil num ambiente de fricções nominais de preços e salários na qual se utilizou modelagem dinâmica estocástica de equilíbrio geral (DSGE) para simular a influência de choques na taxa de juros sobre as variáveis macroeconômicas como inflação, investimento, consumo, emprego, produto marginal do capital e oferta total de moeda, taxa de crescimento da moeda, taxa de juros, entre outras variáveis consistentes com os comportamentos microeconômicos dos agentes encontrando efeitos persistentes desses choques

La théorie économique conduit à supposer que l’assurance santé accroît les consommations médicales en générant du risque moral ex-post, c'est-à-dire l’achat par les individus de soins dont la valeur est faible au regard de leur coût total. Certains économistes soulignent que tout ou partie de ce surplus de consommation peut résulter également d’une solvabilisation de la demande de soins du fait des remboursements, traduisant ainsi un meilleur accès aux soins. Comprendre lequel de ces effets prédomine représente un enjeu important en termes d’équité et d’efficience du système de santé. Cette thèse vise à mesurer l’ampleur de l’effet de l’assurance complémentaire santé sur les consommations médicales en France et à en comprendre la nature en s’appuyant sur trois articles. Le premier article analyse l’effet du fait d’être couvert par une complémentaire santé sur le recours aux médecins, le second évalue l’impact de la CMU-C sur les consommations médicales de ses bénéficiaires, enfin le troisième étudie l’effet d’une surcomplémentaire santé permettant de compléter les remboursements du contrat de base d’une mutuelle de fonctionnaire. En se focalisant sur l’assurance complémentaire et surcomplémentaire, ces articles permettent d’étudier l’effet d’une variation à la marge du niveau de couverture sur différentes catégories de population. / According to economic theory, health insurance raises medical care consumptions by inducing ex-post moral hazard behavior, it is to say the purchase of health care that individual value below their production cost. Nevertheless, among the economists community, some suggest that these additional consumptions may be the consequence of an increase of financial resources in case of illness due to reimbursements, reflecting a better access to health care. Understanding which of these effects dominates is a crucial issue to assess equity and efficiency of health care system. Based on three articles, this thesis aims to estimate how great the effect of complementary health insurance on health care consumptions is in France, and to understand the nature of this effect. The first article analyzes the effect of being covered by a complementary health insurance on the use of physician care, the second article assess how the CMU-C scheme affected health care consumptions of its beneficiaries, and the third article examines the effect of a supplementary health insurance contract that provides reimbursements in addition of the benefits of a basic complementary health insurance contract that covers civil servants. By focusing on complementary and supplementary health insurance, these articles offer the opportunity to study the effect of health insurance at the margin, on different populations.

It is frequently argued that the high costs of clinical trials prior to the admission of new pharmaceuticals are stifling innovation. At the same time, regulation of the access to markets is often justified on the basis of consumers` inability to detect the true quality of a product. We examine these arguments from an information economic perspective by setting a framework where the incentives to invest in R&D are influenced by the information structure prevailing when the product is launched in the market at a later stage. In this setting, by changing the information structure, regulation (or the lack of) can thus indirectly affect R&D efforts. More formally, we construct a moral hazard - cum - adverse selection model in which a pharmaceutical firm exerts an unobservable effort towards developing an innovative (high quality) drug (moral hazard) and then announces the (unobservable) quality outcome to an uninformed regulator and/or consumers (adverse selection). We compare the outcomes in regard to innovation effort and expected welfare under two regimes: (i) regulation, where products undergo a clinical trial designed to ascertain product quality at the point of market access; and (ii) laissez-faire with free entry, where the revelation of quality is left to the market process. Results show that whether or not innovation is greater in the presence of entry regulation crucially depends on the efficacy of the trial in identifying (poor) quality, on the probability that unknown qualities are revealed in the market process, and on the preference and cost structure. The welfare ranking of the two regimes depends on the differential effort incentive and on the net welfare gain from implementing full information instantaneously. For example, in settings of vertical monopoly, vertical differentiation and horizontal differentiation with no variable cost of quality, entry regulation tends to be the preferred regime if the effort incentive under pooling is relatively low and profits do not count too much towards welfare. A complementary numerical Analysis shows how the outcomes vary with the market and cost structure. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series