This paper revisits the debate on altruism vs exchange motive for bequest and studies to what extent the saving behavior of elderly Europeans is di↵erent in the presence or absence of adult children. To this purpose, we develop a structural model with two overlapping generations, namely elderly parents and their adult children. For each generation, we formulate a separate lifecycle model in whi...

Can belief shocks make trading excessive ? We present a dynamic inventory management model in which belief shocks gradually propagate across traders, leading to the inflated trading activity which reduces traders’welfare. Trading can be socially beneficial because smoothing heterogeneous asset positions saves inventory costs. Without belief shocks, traders focus on the socially beneficial tradi...

Grothendieck introduced the notion of a “motif” in a letter to Serre in 1964. Later he wrote that, among the objects he had been privileged to discover, they were the most charged with mystery and formed perhaps the most powerful instrument of discovery.1 In this talk, I shall explain what motives are, and why Grothendieck valued them so highly. These are my notes for a “popular” talk in the ‘W...

A system for automatic motive identification of large folksong corpora is described in this article. The method is based on a dynamic time warping algorithm determining inherent repeating elements of the melodies and a self-organizing map that learns the most typical motive contours. Using this system, the typical motive collections of 22 cultures in Eurasia have been determined, and another gr...

Facial expressions of emotion (FEEs) have been portrayed as potent (dis-) incentives for power-motivated perceivers, because they signal the strength of a sender’s dominance (Stanton, Hall, & Schultheiss, 2010). Here, we tested the hypothesis that individuals with a high implicit power motive (nPower), who have a disposition to seek (emotional) impact on others, would be faster at recognizing F...