Michael Lister has responded to my critique of his work with what Lakatos (1980) called a “problem shift”. In his original paper, Lister (2007) presented empirical evidence that selective welfare state institutions undermine norms of solidarity, which in turn depresses turnout in general elections. In my comment (Arzheimer 2008), I demonstrate that, while the hypothesis is certainly plausible, ...

The Black-Scholes theory, which is the main subject of this course and its sequel, is based on the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that arbitrages (the term will be defined shortly) do not exist in efficient markets. Although this is never completely true in practice, it is a useful basis for pricing theory, and we shall limit our attention (at least for now) to efficient (that is, arbitrage-free)...

Due to the strong complexity of financial markets, economics does not have a unified theory of price formation in financial markets. The most common assumption is the Efficient-Market Hypothesis, which has been attacked by a number of researchers, using different tools. There were varying degrees to which these tools complied with the formal definitions of efficiency and predictability. In our ...

INTRODUCTION................................................................................... 380 I. AVOIDING GRIDLOCK: A FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM FOR THE TELECOM INDUSTRY IS A GRIDLOCKED REGULATORY PROCESS........................................................... 381 A. General Reasons for Regulatory Gridlock.......................... 384 B. Telecom Act As a Specific Cause of Gridlock .............

Forecasting markets are a promising approach for predicting future events. The basic idea of a forecasting market is to trade virtual stocks whose final value is tied to a particular future event. The market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of those future events. The results of recent studies on forecasting markets are encouraging. However, various design issues...

The considerable attention that increasing needs to acquire Internet Medical Information (IMI) has received in recent years, there has been little research to systematically investigate the factors influencing users’ intention to adopt the IMI. The authors apply the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) to evaluate how users form the intention to adopt IMI on bulletin boards. An online survey was co...

With the increasing globalization of the business world, international segmentation becomes an ever more important concept in marketing. The globalization forces now at work push many companies to extend or reorganize their marketing strategies across borders and target international segments of consumers. It is the purpose of this paper to review the international market segmentation literatur...

The purpose of this paper is to consider the basic questions relative to the creation and organization of markets for knowledge. The paper is organized as follows. We will first explain what means for us an intuitionalist approach of markets, and the key questions relative to the social construction of markets. On that basis, we will consider the specific problems posed by the creation of marke...

Technical analysis is the art of identifying patterns in historical data with the belief that certain patterns foretell future price movements. An empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of technical analysis is confounded by the subjectivity involved in identifying patterns. This work presents a robust framework for pattern identification using probabilistic neural networks (PNN). The thirty...