Out of their after-tax profits, corporations pay dividends and often repurchase shares to generate capital gains for their shareholders. Capital gains typically attract lower effective rates of tax than dividends, which leads to the payout puzzle: Why do corporations continue to pay dividends in spite of their relative tax disadvantage? This paper develops a model of corporate payout policy to ...

We develop an explanation of the emergence of local norms and the associated phenomenon of geographical variation in behavior. Individuals are assumed to interact locally with neighbors in an environment with a network externality. Although many patterns of behavior are possible, the dispersed interactive choices of agents are shown to select behavior that is locally uniform but globally divers...

The purpose of this article is to introduce, analyze and compare two performance participation methods based on a portfolio consisting of two risky assets: Option-Based Performance Participation (OBPP) and Constant Proportion Performance Participation (CPPP). By generalizing the provided guarantee to a participation in the performance of a second risky underlying, the new strategies allow to co...

Renting software applications from an application service provider is generally assumed to provide significant overall cost savings. Whether these savings benefit the customer or provide high profit margins for the provider is a priori not clear. Lock-in of customers might reduce competition and enable the service provider to charge premium prices. We investigate in this paper the strength of l...

Combining legal content stores of different providers is usually time, effort and money intensive due to the usually ’hard-wired’ links between different parts of the constituting sources within those stores. In practice users of legal content are confronted with a vendor lock-in situation and have to find work-arounds when they want to combine their own content with the content provided by oth...

Using a secure screen lock mechanism is important to prevent unauthorized access and compromise of valuable data stored on smartphones. However, many users still choose not to use any such mechanism and often state inconvenience as the main reason. In this paper, we argue that lack of risk awareness plays an important role behind many users’ insecure behavior rather than inconvenience, which ca...

Prisons are essential to a safe and civil society. Prisons are also costly for the taxpayers whose government houses, feeds, medicates, and supervisesmillions of people under lock andkey. This expense is compounded by errors in the u.S. legal system that produces both false guilty verdicts and overly harsh penalties. It’s time for the united States to take a closer look at these unnecessary inc...