This paper suggests that the ability of consumers to choose accurately between alternative suppliers is substantially limited even in a relatively simple and transparent market. Across two independent datasets from the UK electricity market we find, on aggregate, that those consumers switching exclusively for price reasons appropriated between a quarter and a half of the maximum gains available...

We examined whether a bilingual advantage can be found in older bilinguals that share the same cultural background with monolinguals. Sixteen Gaelic-English bilinguals over the age of 60 years were compared with three monolingual control groups in performance on the Simon task, as well as in general intelligence and socio-economic status. Some of the monolinguals were bidialectal allowing us to...

Turn-taking in conversation is a cognitively demanding process that proceeds rapidly due to interlocutors utilizing a range of cues to aid prediction. In the present study we set out to test recent claims that content question words (also called wh-words) sound similar within languages as an adaptation to help listeners predict that a question is about to be asked. We test whether upcoming ques...

We consider a repeated duopoly game where each firm privately chooses its investment in quality, and realized quality is a noisy indicator of the firm’s investment. We focus on dynamic reputation equilibria, whereby consumers ‘discipline’ a firm by switching to its rival in the case that the realized quality of its product is too low. This type of equilibrium is characterized by consumers’ tole...

Should an investor unwind his portfolio in the face of changing economic conditions? We study an investor’s optimal trading strategy with finite horizon and transaction costs in an economy that switches stochastically between two market conditions. We fully characterize the investor’s time dependent investment strategy in a ‘‘bull’’ market and a ‘‘bear’’ market. We show that when the market swi...

We establish that [1]’s parameters are universally unidentified and a subset of their parameterization is over identified. As a solution to the problem with the identifiability, we propose a new representation of double-regime three-factor GDTSMs whose parameters are just-identified when the number of the pricing-with-error yields equals 2. This new parametrization has another advantage over [2...

We model the semantic recall sequences of 424 older adults aged between 69 to 103 years in the animal fluency task. Our results suggest that, under normal intellectual functioning, memory search in old age (69–84 years) is consistent with a dynamic process that switches between retrieval probes. With dementia and very old age (85–103 years), however, memory search seems to become more consisten...

Rule learning posits that decision makers, rather than choosing over actions, choose over behavioral rules with different levels of sophistication. Rules are reinforced over time based on their historically observed payoffs in a given game. Past works on rule learning have shown that when playing a single game over a number of rounds, players can learn to form sophisticated beliefs about others...

The sharp increase in agricultural commodity prices in 2008 and in 2011 has triggered an intensive debate on the causes for these price booms. Speculative bubbles have been quoted as one factor among others for the price peaks. Against this background, our paper contributes to this discussion by implementing a novel test procedure for speculative bubbles which has been suggested in the stock ma...

We characterize the properties of oneand two-dimensional transmission lines periodically loaded with electronic switches, for use in managing amplitude and propagation orientations of pulses traveling on the lines. The detection of the input voltage level is successfully demonstrated experimentally using the test switch line. Moreover, the orientation of pulse propagation is controllable in a t...