The Threat of Exclusion and Relational Contracting

Relational contracts have been shown to mitigate moral hazard in labor and credit markets. A central assumption in most theoretical and experimental studies is that, upon misbehaving, agents can be excluded from their current source of income and have to resort to less attractive outside options. This threat of exclusion is unrealistic in many environments, and especially in credit and investment contexts. We examine experimentally the emergence and time structure of relational contracts when the threat of exclusion is weakened. We focus on bilateral credit relationships in which strategic default is possible. We compare a weak exclusion treatment in which defaulting borrowers can reinvest borrowed funds, to a strong exclusion treatment in which defaulting borrowers must liquidate borrowed funds. We find that under weak exclusion more relationships break down in early periods and credit relationships are more likely to “start small”

Building creative confidence in idea management processes to improve idea generation in new product development teams

This is a scoping paper that aims to establish effective practices and key players in the domain of Idea Management. The paper defines Idea Management as the generation, evaluation and selection of ideas. The purpose of the paper is to map the current landscape of methodologies and tools in order to identify gaps and support the development of a framework to enhance creative confidence in idea management. The study has two key research questions: (i) what factors are influencing current idea generation practices and (ii) what tools and approaches exist for idea generation. This will help identify how creative confidence can influence the idea generation processes. Creative confidence is the capability to come up with breakthrough ideas, associated with the bravery to perform. If stimulated in the right way with a valuable framework, its impact on employees’ performance is significant in improving team members’ innovation performance and quality of ideas

Complexity and Biases

We examine experimentally how complexity affects decision-making, when individuals choose among different products with varying benefits and costs. We find that complexity in costs leads to choosing a high-benefit product, with high costs and overall lower payoffs. In contrast, when complexity is in the benefits of the product, we cannot reject the hypothesis of random mistakes. We also examine the role of heterogeneous complexity. We find that individuals still (mistakenly) choose the high-benefit but costly product, even if cheaper and simple products are available. Our results suggest that salience is a main driver of choices under different forms of complexity

Peer Effects in Risk Taking

This paper examines the effect of peers on individual risk taking. In the absence of informational motives, we investigate why social utility concerns may drive peer effects. We test for two main channels: utility from payoff differences and from conforming to the peer. We show experimentally that social utility generates substantial peer effects in risk taking. These are mainly explained by utility from payoff differences, in line with outcomebased social preferences. Contrary to standard assumptions, we show that estimated social preference parameters change significantly when peers make active choices, compared to when lotteries are randomly assigned to them

Higgs bundles for the Lorentz group

Using the Morse-theoretic methods introduced by Hitchin, we prove that the moduli space of \SO_0(1,n)-Higgs bundles when $n$ is odd has two connected components

Qualitative properties and existence of sign changing solutions with compact support for an equation with a p-Laplace operator

We consider radial solutions of an elliptic equation involving the p-Laplace operator and prove by a shooting method the existence of compactly supported solutions with any prescribed number of nodes. The method is based on a change of variables in the phase plane corresponding to an asymptotic Hamiltonian system and provides qualitative properties of the solutions

Prosody, polyphony and politeness: A polyphonic approach to prosodic configurations common to French and Spanish

From a theoretical perspective based on the Theory of Argumentation in Language (Théorie de l’Argumentation dans la Langue – TAL) and the Theory of Polyphony (Théorie de la Polyphonie Énonciative – TPE), the present study describes and analyses polyphonic configurations that are disclosed through the use of certain voice traits; configurations which, unmistakably common to both French and Spanish, are manifested by what is said and what is prosodically shown in utterances. Within a French corpus and a Spanish corpus of naturally occurring discourse, the patent polyphonic dimension of intonation has been explored in order to demonstrate that locutors’ utterances themselves reveal the orientation of enunciation through both the marking of the lexical and grammatical components and the prosody within which they are embedded. Through this study, the authors show how the locutor – the discursive character presented by the utterance as responsible for its enunciation – puts on stage a multiplicity of enunciators, or viewpoints, which allow him or her to protect the image of self, i.e., the locutor’s own image, and expose, protect or enhance that of others. Polyphony is materialized in two different ways: one in which the enunciator embodied in the prosody reinforces the locutor’s assimilation to the wording of the utterance and another in which the enunciator corresponding to the intonational feature does not match what is expressed through words.Fil: Garcia Negroni, Maria Marta. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Lingüística; ArgentinaFil: Caldiz, Adriana Mabel. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Departamento de Lenguas Modernas; Argentin