This paper examines the potential for adverse selection when farmers are offered a portfolio of insurance policies. We analyze the risk characteristics farmers who bought alternative insurance instruments in 1996-97. Inability to differentiate farmers according to risk types results in poor actuarial performance of insurance product. —————————————— Authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comment...

This paper analyzes the potential trade offs and complementarities that exist between intra-year strategies employing annual price and yield risk contracts and inter-year self-insurance strategies involving intertemporal consumption substitution and borrowing, and explores whether standard crop insurance contracts can be made more useful to farmers if offered with a multiple-year horizon. —————...

Book review:
 Pikli, Natália. Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2021. 286 pages. ISBN 9780367514150. Hb. $160.00

In this paper we present a mapping between joy, distress, hope and fear, and Reinforcement Learning primitives. Joy / distress is a signal that is derived from the RL update signal, while hope/fear is derived from the utility of the current state. Agent-based simulation experiments replicate psychological and behavioral dynamics of emotion including: joy and distress reactions that develop prio...

This paper investigates entry decisions into first and second price auctions using an experimental design to extract information on willingness-to-pay to enter (WTE). We find that subjects tend to overpay to enter both auction formats. In particular, if the subjects believe they will be bidding against bidders following the risk-neutral Nash strategy, their WTE is greater than the optimal risk-...