Cheating is a serious problem in many countries. The cheater gets higher marks than deserved, thus reducing the efficiency of a country’s educational system. In this study, the authors did not ask if and how often the student had cheated, but rather what the student’s opinion was...

We consider the estimation of the unknown mean "&eegr;" of a univariate normal distribution N("&eegr;", 1) given a single observation "x". We wish to obtain an estimator which is admissible and has good risk (and regret) properties. We first argue that the "usual" estimator "t" ("x") = "x" is not...

This paper develops a dynamic model consisting of two regions (North and South), in which the accumulation of human capital is negatively influenced by the global stock of pollution. By characterizing the equilibrium strategy of each region, we show that the regions’ best responses can be...

We consider the question whether top tennis players in a top tournament (Wimbledon) employ an optimal (efficient) service strategy. We show that top players do not, in general, follow an optimal strategy, and we provide a lower bound of the inefficiency. The inefficiency regarding winning a...

type="main" xml:id="obes12068-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>In specifying a regression equation, we need to specify which regressors to include, but also how these regressors are measured. This gives rise to two levels of uncertainty: concepts (level 1) and measurements within each concept (level 2). In...</p>

We introduce an accurate, easily implementable, and fast algorithm to compute optimal decisions in discrete-time long-horizon welfaremaximizing problems. The algorithm is useful when interest is only in the decisions up to period T, where T is small. It relies on a flexible parametrization of...

Bayesian model averaging attempts to combine parameter estimation and model uncertainty in one coherent framework. The choice of prior is then critical. Within an explicit framework of ignorance we define a ‘suitable’ prior as one which leads to a continuous and suitable analog to the...

Data in econometrics are, as a rule, non-experimental and hence we have to use the same data set to select the model and also to estimate the parameters in the selected model.In standard applied econometrics practice, however, one reports zero bias and some variance of the (pretest) estimators...