Een wetenschapper in de beleidswereld

Sinds 2001 heb ik een paar grotere, interessante projecten mogen doen, zoals het evaluatieonderzoek voor de Tweede Kamer naar de veiling van UMTS-frequenties. Daarnaast heb ik in opdracht van verschillende bedrijven diverse NMa-studies van commentaar voorzien. Vanuit mijn persoonlijke ervaring wil ik een aantal reacties op het artikel van Geurts en Raes geven

Auctions as Collusion Devices

This paper develops an economic argument relating auctions to high market prices. At the core of the argument is the claim that market competition and bidding in an auction should be analyzed as part of one game, where the pricing strategies in the market subgame depend on the bidding strategies during the auction.I show that the only equilibrium in the overall game that is consistent with the logic of forward induction is the one where firms bid an amount (almost) equal to the profits of the cooperative market outcome and follow a cooperative pricing strategy in the market game resulting in high prices

Sociology in the Economic Mode

A Review Essay on James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990

Microfoundations

This paper gives an overview and evaluates the literature on Microfoundations

On the Strategic Use of Focal Points in Bargaining Situations

This paper argues that the notion of focal points is important in understanding bargaining processes. Recent literature confines a discussion of the usefulness of the notion to coordination problems and when bargaining experiments result in outcomes that are inconsistent with a straightforward interpretation of economic theory, some notion of ‘fairness’ is invoked. This paper uses symmetry requirements to formalize the notion of focal points. By doing so, it explains the focality of equal split division and it re-interprets recent experimental evidence in bargaining games. Experimental economists should try to empirically disentangle the importance of focal points from other explanatory factors (such as fairness). One way to do so, would be to study modal (instead of average) responses more systematically. Future theoretical research should focus on the strategic implications of proposing a frame (focal point) to conceive of the bargaining problem

Imitation of Cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma Games with Some Local Interaction

In this paper I study conditions for the emergence of cooperative behavior in a dynamic model of population interaction. The model has finitely many individuals located on a circle. The pay- off of each individual is partly based on the (local) interaction with neighbors and partly on (uniform) interaction with the whole population. The dynamics is driven by imitative behavior. I show that for a large class of parameters cooperation will emerge if the population is large; if the population is small, defection will prevail in the long run. The result contrasts with conventional wisdom which says that the larger the population, the less likely cooperation will be

Towards a Justification the Principle of Coordination

Different variations of a Principle of Coordination are used in a number of different research traditions. Roughly speaking, one version of the Principle says that if there is a unique Pareto-efficient outcome in a game, then players will choose their part of that outcome. In this paper I will investigate the foundations of the Principle and see to what extent the Principle follows from some axioms regarding rational individual decision-making

On the Principle of Coordination

On many occasions, individuals are able to coordinate their actions. The first empirical evidence to this effect has been described by Schelling (1960) in an informal experiment. His results were corroborated many years later by Mehta et al. (1994a,b) and Bacharach and Bernasconi (1997). From the point of view of mainstream game theory, the success of individuals in coordinating their actions is something of a mystery. If there are two or more strict Nash equilibria, mainstream game theory has no means of explaining why people tend to choose their part of one and the same equilibrium. Textbooks (see, e.g., Rasmusen, 1989 and Kreps, 1990) refer to the fact that players may use focal points (see Schelling (1960)) or social conventions (see Lewis (1969)). Both notions cannot easily be incorporated into mainstream game theory, however. The notion of social conventions has recently been extensively studied in the context of evolutionary game theory where a population of agents interacts with each other. The central focus of this paper, however, is on situations where a few players play a game only once and I study how they may coordinate their actions

Catching Hipo's: Screening, Wages and Unemployment

In this paper, I study the wage a firm sets to attract high ability workers (hipo's) in situations of unemployment. I show that the higher unemployment, the larger a firm's incentives to sort high and low ability workers. Moreover, workers will signal their (high) ability in situations of (high) unemployment only if a job offers a high enough wage. The main result, therefore, says that a firm sets higher wages, the higher unemployment. As the model is applicable to the upper segment of the labour market, the result is in line with the empirical fact that income inequality increases when more people are unemployed