This paper studies the influence of shared guilt and diffused responsibility in institutions that may require the support of several actors to realize specific outcomes. Decision makers weigh supporting an immoral yet egoistically advantageous action to the detriment of a third party against...

Frequently, dynamic hedging strategies minimizing risk exposure are not given in closed form, but need to be approximated numerically. This makes it difficult to estimate residual hedging risk, also called basis risk, when only imperfect hedging instruments are at hand. We propose an easy to...

We prove explicit error bounds for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to compute expectations of functions with unbounded stationary variance. We assume that there is a p∈(1,2) so that the functions have finite Lp-norm. For uniformly ergodic Markov chains we obtain error bounds with the...

We show that deliberately introducing a nested simulation stage can lead to significant variance reductions when comparing two stopping times by Monte Carlo. We derive the optimal number of nested simulations and prove that the algorithm is remarkably robust to misspecifications of this number....

We reveal pitfalls in the hedging of insurance contracts with a minimum return guarantee on the underlying investment, e.g. an external mutual fund. We analyze basis risk entailed by hedging the guarantee with a dynamic portfolio of proxy assets for the funds. We also take account of liquidity...

We study how institutional design in influences moral transgression. People are heterogeneous in their feelings of guilt and can share guilt with others. Institutions determine the number of supporters necessary for immoral outcomes to occur. With more supporters required, every supporter can...

We study how institutional design influences moral transgression. People are heterogeneous in their feelings of guilt and can share guilt with others. Institutions determine the number of supporters necessary for immoral outcomes to occur. With more supporters required, every supporter can share...

We generalize the primal-dual methodology, which is popular in the pricing of early-exercise options, to a backward dynamic programming equation associated with time discretization schemes of (reflected) backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs). Taking as an input some approximate...

Auctions are the allocation-mechanisms of choice whenever goods and information in markets are scarce. Therefore, understanding how information affects welfare and revenues in these markets is of fundamental interest. We introduce new statistical concepts, k- and k-m-dispersion, for...