Chatbots as prominent form of conversational agents are increasingly implemented as a user interface for digital customer-firm interactions on digital platforms and electronic markets, but they often fail to deliver suitable responses to user requests. In turn, individuals are left dissatisfied...

Negative interest rates remain a controversial policy for central banks. We study a novel signalling channel and ask under what conditions negative rates should exist in an optimal policymaker's toolkit. We prove two necessary conditions for the optimality of negative rates: a time-consistent...

While negative interest rates stimulate the real economy by enhancing credit supply and improving the wealth situation of firms and households, they might come with side effects with regard to banking and financial stability. In an assessment of the trade-off between the ability of a central...