Industrial organization is mainly concerned with the behavior of large firms, especially when it comes to oligopoly theory. Experimental industrial organization, therefore, faces a problem: How can firms be brought into the laboratory? The main approach relies on framing: Call individuals...

This paper reviews some of the economic experimental evidence on conformism. There is nothing to match the early psychology experiments where subjects were often swayed by the behaviour of others to an extraordinary degree, but there is plenty of evidence of conformism. This seems built-in to...

The Belt and Road initiative, recently embarked on by China, aims to improve cross-border infrastructure in order to reduce transportation costs across a massive geographical area between China and Europe. The authors estimate how much trade might be created among Belt and Road countries as a...

Since the 1990s, South Korea's population has been aging and its fertility rate has fallen. At the same time, the number of Koreans living abroad has risen considerably. These trends threaten to diminish South Korea's international and economic stature. To mitigate the negative effects of these...

This paper uses the 2005 and 2006 China General Social Survey (CGSS) to study the relationship between social capital and self-reported health in China. It is the most comprehensive analysis of this subject to date, both in the sizes of the samples it analyses, in the number of social capital...

In this paper we study income polarization by first comparing the efficiency of two statistical models to identify the number of poles in the income distribution empirically. The statistical models used are a multi-resolution analysis (MRA) and a log-normal approach (LNA). We then apply the...

The authors performed a comprehensive time series segmentation study on the 36 Nikkei Japanese industry indices from 1 January 1996 to 11 June 2010. From the temporal distributions of the clustered segments, we found that the Japanese economy never fully recovered from the extended 1997-2003...

Many experimental studies and surveys have shown that women consistently display more risk-averse behavior than men when confronted with decisions involving risk. These differences in risk preferences, when combined with gender differences in other behavioral traits, such as fondness for...

Employers want motivated and productive employees. Are there ways to increase employee motivation without relying solely on monetary incentives, such as pay-for-performance schemes? One tool that has shown promise in recent decades for improving worker performance is setting goals, whether they...

Economists typically predict that people are inherently selfish; however, experimental evidence suggests that this is often not the case. In particular, delegating a choice (such as a wage) to the performing party may imbue this party with a sense of responsibility, leading to improved outcomes...