[T]he literature of risk aversion and risk preference [is] one of the richest sources of ad hoc assumptions concerning tastes. ... [N]o significant behavior has been illuminated by assumptions of differences in tastes. ... [Such theories] have been a convenient crutch to lean on when the analysis has bogged down. ... They give the appearance of considered judgement, yet really have only been ad hoc arguments that disguise analytical failures. -George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker (1977 p. 89)

We examine the choice of quotas by legal volume-restricting organizations: cartels, commodity agreements, agricultural marketing boards, and prorationing boards. Unlike their illegal counterparts, legal cartels have published regulations and broader enforcement capabilities. However, differences in costs and size among cartel members still make quota selection contentious. Conflicts over quotas are typically resolved by voting. Side-payments to influence votes are prohibited. We examine the predicted effects of this real-world voting institution on prices and welfare. We also deduce the economic consequences of exogenous political changes such as alterations in the voting weights or in the identity of the voters.

Abstract Examines empirically the prediction of long-term stock return volatility. Using historical volatility to predict five-year monthly volatility; Constructing a forecast based on historical volatilities of comparable films; Forming a shrinkage forecast by adjusting a historical forecast toward a comparable-firms forecast.

[This study examines empirically the prediction of long-term stock return volatility. We find: (1) when using historical volatility to predict five-year monthly volatility, returns should be measured either weekly or monthly, and the historical period should be approximately five years; (2) when constructing a forecast based solely on historical volatilities of comparable firms, comparable firms should be selected on the basis of industry and firm size; and (3) a shrinkage forecast formed by adjusting a historical forecast toward a comparable-firms forecast is more accurate than either a historical or a comparable-firms forecast. Our results suggest that errors in pricing employee stock options due to errors in predicting long-term volatility would rarely have a material effect on net income.]

This paper investigates stability properties of evolutionary selection dynamics in normal-form games. The analysis is focused on deterministic dynamics in continuous time and on asymptotic stability of sets of population states, more precisely of faces of the mixed-strategy space. The main result is a characterization of those faces which are asymptotically stable in all dynamics from a certain class, and we show that every such face contains an essential component of the set of Nash equilibria, and hence a strategically stable set in the sense of Kohlberg and Mertens (1986).

In this paper, we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and Catholic schools: finishing high school and starting college. These measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education. Single-equation estimates suggest that for the typical student, attending a Catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four-year college by thirteen percentage points. In bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single-equation estimates are subject to selection bias.

The predictability of an asset's returns will affect the prices of options on that asset, even though predictability is typically induced by the drift, which does not enter the option pricing formula. For discretely sampled data, predictability is linked to the parameters that do enter the option pricing formula. The authors construct an adjustment for predictability to the Black-Scholes formula and show that this adjustment can be important even for small levels of predictability, especially for longer maturity options. They propose several continuous-time linear diffusion processes that can capture broader forms of predictability and provide numerical examples that illustrate their importance for pricing options.

This paper evaluates the conjecture that excess stock returns that have been documented around the announcement of corporate spin-offs represent, at least in part, the re-creation of value destroyed at the time of an earlier acquisition. We evaluate this question with a sample of spin-offs that originated as earlier acquisitions. At the time of the original acquisition, on average, announcement period returns to the bidder and the combined bidder and target firm are negative and significant. Additionally, announcement period returns at the time of the spin-off are negatively and significantly correlated with acquisition announcement period returns.

Two-person repeated games with no discounting are considered where there is uncertainty about the type of the players. If there is a possibility that a player is an automaton committed to a particular pure or mixed stage -game action, then this provides a lower bound on the Nash equilibrium payoffs to a normal type of this player. The lower bound is the best available and is robust to the existence of other types. The results are extended to the case of two-sided uncertainty. This work extends Schmidt (1993) who analysed the restricted class of conflicting interest games.