Testing Myopia in Economic Models

This paper suggests a simple test of whether agents are forward-looking or myopic that can be implemented on the type of backward-looking econometric models that are usually estimated.. We argue that myopic behaviour implies a simple parametric restriction that will not hold if agents are forward-looking. We illustrate our tests by examining price adjustment in the UK using aggregate quarterly data from 1963-1997. Our evidence strongly suggests that pricesetting is forward-looking and not myopic

Economic models of employee motivation

Workers, being human beings, present employers with a range of tricky problems. Humans, unlike filing cabinets, can be crooked, subversive, surly, or indolent, even if they are paid on time. In this article we explore economists' main models of how compensation is used to address employee motivation and how these models help to explain puzzling features of the labor market.Wages ; Management ; Labor market

Admissible target paths in economic models

Social Psychology;econometrics

Economic models of consumer protection policies

This paper summarizes some of my recent work on consumer protection. I present three theoretical models which illustrate the merits and drawbacks of a number of common consumer protection policies, namely: policies which prevent firms from setting unduly high prices; policies which prevent firms requiring on-the-spot decision making by prospective customers, and policies which prevent suppliers from paying commission payments to sales intermediaries.Consumer protection, consumer search, marketing, commission sales

Towards Economic Models for MOOC Pricing Strategy Design

MOOCs have brought unprecedented opportunities of making high-quality courses accessible to everybody. However, from the business point of view, MOOCs are often challenged for lacking of sustainable business models, and academic research for marketing strategies of MOOCs is also a blind spot currently. In this work, we try to formulate the business models and pricing strategies in a structured and scientific way. Based on both theoretical research and real marketing data analysis from a MOOC platform, we present the insights of the pricing strategies for existing MOOC markets. We focus on the pricing strategies for verified certificates in the B2C markets, and also give ideas of modeling the course sub-licensing services in B2B markets

Terminal conditions in forward-looking economic models

In this paper we show how the popular L-B-J algorithm for solving forward-looking economic models using Newton methods can be gen- eralised to allow for a block of terminal equations for variables that appear with a lead. The e¤ect of choosing di¤erent types of termi- nal condition is explored in a simple stochastic growth model using WinSolve, a general nonlinear model solution package.

On the policy function in continuos time economic models

In this paper, I consider a general class of continuous-time economic models with unbounded horizon. I study the sets of conditions under which the policy function is continuous, Lipschitz continuous, and Cl differentiable. 1 also single out certain postulates which may prevent higher-order differentiability. The analysis provides, therefore, a fmn foundation to the use of dynamic programming methods in continuous time models with unbounded horizo