Design narratives: an intuitive scientific form for capturing design knowledge in education

This paper provides a brief introduction to design-based research in education, its rationale and principles. It then highlights some of the challenges in reporting on design research, and proposes design narratives as a suitable form to address these challenges. Design narratives are characterized as a form of scientific discourse, and guidelines are proposed for their construction

Investment under Uncertainty and the Recipient of the Entry Cost

A typical model of investment under uncertainty where firms incur an irreversible cost in order to produce is studied with a novel focus on the reciever of this cost ("the source"). The source is modeled as a firm or a government that sells a resource or a right that are necessary for the production of the final good. We study in detail how the source sets its resource's price. We find that this price is a decreasing function of the elasticity of the demand for the final good. We also find that when this demand is sufficiently low, the source does not lower its price accordingly, and the producers of the final good delay their purchases of the resource. The reason is that the source expects demand to be higher in the future and does not want to be committed then to a low price for its resource

Tax, Stimuli of Investment and Firm Value

Pennings (2000) has shown that the government can speed-up investment by subsidizing the potential investing firm's entry cost while taxing the future proceeds from the investment, so as to render the net expected value of its subsidy program zero. This note argues that while speeding-up the investment timing, this subsidy-tax program also lowers the value of the firm and therefore will be rejected by it.Investment; Uncertainty; Option Value

Labor Hours in the U.S. and Europe - the Role of Different Preferences Towards Leisure

Since 1950, the quantity of working hours has been decreasing over time both in the U.S. and in the main European economies. The European economies have started this mutual decline process with longer working hours than in the U.S., but have ended it with less working hours than the U.S. This article presents a model in which this dynamic pattern for the joint dynamics of their working hours is shared by two economies that differ only in the weight that their individuals put on leisure in their utility function and are identical in every other respect.Working hours; Economic Growth

Investment under Uncertainty and the Recipient of the Entry Cost

A typical model of investment under uncertainty where firms incur an irreversible cost in order to produce is studied with a novel focus on the reciever of this cost ("the source"). The source is modeled as a firm or a government that sells a resource or a right that are necessary for the production of the final good. We study in detail how the source sets its resource's price. We find that this price is a decreasing function of the elasticity of the demand for the final good. We also find that when this demand is sufficiently low, the source does not lower its price accordingly, and the producers of the final good delay their purchases of the resource. The reason is that the source expects demand to be higher in the future and does not want to be committed then to a low price for its resource.Investment; Uncertainty

Optimal Algorithm for Bayesian Incentive-Compatible Exploration

We consider a social planner faced with a stream of myopic selfish agents. The goal of the social planner is to maximize the social welfare, however, it is limited to using only information asymmetry (regarding previous outcomes) and cannot use any monetary incentives. The planner recommends actions to agents, but her recommendations need to be Bayesian Incentive Compatible to be followed by the agents. Our main result is an optimal algorithm for the planner, in the case that the actions realizations are deterministic and have limited support, making significant important progress on this open problem. Our optimal protocol has two interesting features. First, it always completes the exploration of a priori more beneficial actions before exploring a priori less beneficial actions. Second, the randomization in the protocol is correlated across agents and actions (and not independent at each decision time).Comment: EC 201