Entrepreneurs Under Uncertainty: An Economic Experiment in China

This study reports findings from the first large-scale experiment investigating whether entrepreneurs differ 1 from other people in their willingness to expose themselves to various forms of uncertainty. A stratified random sample of 700 chief executive officers from the Yangzi delta region in China is compared to 200 control group members. Our findings suggest that in economic decisions, entrepreneurs are more willing to accept strategic uncertainty related to multilateral competition and trust. However, entrepreneurs do not differ from ordinary people when it comes to nonstrategic forms of uncertainty, such as risk and ambiguity

Can Economic Theory Explain Piracy Behavior?

This paper investigates if economic theory can explain variations in piracy behavior between individuals and between countries. It is demonstrated that economic theory explains a notable part of the individual variation in a survey study. Individuals with a low net valuation of an original when a copy is available are more prone to engage in piracy than individuals with a higher valuation. Individuals with a low cost of obtaining and handling copies are also more engaged in piracy. The country-wise variation can also be explained by economic variables; GNI/capita and judicial eciency explain a substantial part of this variation

Gender Based Focal Points

The subjects behaved significantly more “hawkish” in an experimental battle of the sexes game when the co-player was a woman compared to when it was a man. Discrimination helped the parties to coordinate and increase the average earnings in the subject group of mixed sex, compared to the unisex groups

Genetic Information and Investment in Human Capital

In a game of incomplete information we analyze the consequences of giving an employer access to imperfect genetic information about his employees. The employer chooses whether to invest in the employee and the employee chooses a life style. We derive the condition for markets of information services to exist and the conditions for when it is beneficial to the various parties. In one specification of the game, the mere introduction of the information service may change the employee's choice of health behavior, which means that the value of genetic information may be negative to the employer

Predicting the Effects of Intervention and Sabotage in a Boundedly Complex Game

Conditions for predicting the effects of intervention with certainty are derived. An outside observer studies sequences of actions from a two-person repeated prisoners' dilemma. The sequences are generated by finite automata, which are optimal at each stage of the game and also minimize the number of states. An intervention is a change of action for one of the players and a prediction is a statement about what action the other player will choose in the next period. One result is that predictions can always be made certain at some stages of the game

Markets are more than Bits

This paper argues that the main contribution of Mirowski's paper is the new combination of some seemingly unrelated ideas, like principles for market evolvement and automata theory. Furthermore, many of Mirowski's ideas ought to be inspiring for future economic research. However, it is argued that some ideas, if scrutinized, are difficult to motivate, and other need further refinement before they can provide a firm basis for a new research programme in economics. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved