The implications of the international demonstration effect (IDE) for the development of underdeveloped economies have long been studied and debated. Yet few formal analyses exist in the literature, especially regarding its implications for the growth of domestic markets and the division of...

In this short paper, we investigate the behavior of the age-dependent value of a statistical life (VSL) within a lifecycle framework with a finite maximal possible lifespan. Some existing results, obtained under the unrealistic assumption of an infinite life expectancy, are reversed. In...

First of all, one point seems in order regarding the title: this article is not intended to be comprehensive in its coverage. Rather, it focuses on a deliberately and highly selected body of studies on the division of labor ranging from ancient Greeks to WWII as represented by those reproduced...

In the popularly used ranking method of peer rating, the exclusion of the evaluations/marks given to oneselves is intuitively appealing and has been actually practiced, since a person/university/country typically is biased in favor of itself. This short paper shows that this apparently...

Brody (1997) notices that for large random Leontief matrices, namely non-negative square matrices with all entries i.i.d., the ratio between the subdominant eigenvalue (in modulus) and the dominant eigenvalue declines generically to zero at a speed of the square root of the size of the matrix as...

No abstract received.

This Note takes a preliminary investigation into the axiomatic measurement of the division of labor. We first introduce a matrix that we refer to as labor specialization matrix (LSM) to describe specialization patterns of individuals, and then present some axioms for reasonable measures of the...

We investigate whether people are influenced to make investment decisions based on random shock signals and to what extent they do so by exploiting a unique data set from a popular Chinese lottery game with over one million observations. We first present evidence that people, as individual...