One goal of game theory is to understand how effective cooperation can be sustained in relationships. You may have heard of Axelrod’s famous tournaments that studied how effective different submitted strategies are in sustaining cooperation in repeated Prisoners’ dilemma games. A related approach to understand the scope for cooperation ... [Read more...]

When developing a new R project, I usually want to quickly get some examples running. This means in early stages, I don’t spend much time to consistently name my functions or variables. Correspondingly, there is usually a later phase, before making t... [Read more...]

gtree is a new R package that allows to specify extensive form games using stages, similar as one specifies economic experiments with ztree or otree. Let us specify a simple ultimatum game in gtree. A proposer can offer the responder between 0 and 10 ... [Read more...]

At Ulm University, we currently use RTutor for several elective courses where students solve interactive problem sets at home. They can test their solutions and get automatic hints, and then submit their solution. Starting next year, we plan to use RTutor in a new compulsory data science project course in ... [Read more...]

An earlier post from February, describes a Shiny app that allows to search among currently more than 4000 economic articles that have an accessible data and code supplement. Finally, I managed to configure an nginx reverse proxy server and now you can also access the app under a proper https link ... [Read more...]

There are nowadays different options to create interactive R tutorials that allow users to type in code, automatically check their solution and get hints if they are stuck. Two options are RStudio’s learnr package and my RTutor package. Obviously, ... [Read more...]

Last week I stumbled across a very interesting recent Econometrica article by Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjuro. I was really surprised by the statistical result they discovered and guess the issue may even have fooled Nobel Prize winning behavioral economists. Before showing the statistical subtlety, let me briefly explain the ... [Read more...]

In my view, one of the greatest developments during the last decade in economics is that the Journals of the American Economic Association and some other leading journals require authors to upload the replication code and data sets of accepted articles. I wrote a Shiny app that allows to search ... [Read more...]

In my view, one of the greatest developments during the last decade in economics is that the Journals of the American Economic Association and some other leading journals require authors to upload the replication code and data sets of accepted articles. I wrote a Shiny app that allows to search ... [Read more...]

Since about two weeks, I face a large additional traffic jam every morning due to a construction site on the road. When passing the construction site, often only few people or sometimes nobody seems to be working there. Being an economist, I really won... [Read more...]

How does driving an electric car compare to driving a similar gasoline car in terms of total pollution damages? While some comments about the future of mobility may suggest that electric cars are already clearly much more environmental friendly, the an... [Read more...]

A small blog post with a riddle, simulation, theory and a concluding rhyme. Consider a fictitious example in which we have collected a sample of somewhat overweight persons for which we measured weight in kg as $y$ and height in cm as $x$. We estimate the following simple linear regression: ... [Read more...]

I just learned about RStudio Cloud (see https://rstudio.cloud/) that allows to simply run RStudio instances from your browser. Moreover, you can simply set-up RStudio projects that other users can simply copy and use themselves. RStudio Cloud is still in alpha and currently one can freely register to use ... [Read more...]

Recently, a paper was presented at our university that showed a significant effect for a variable of interest but had a relatively small number of observations. One colleague suggested that we should consider the significance of the results with care since the number of observations was fairly small. This ignited ... [Read more...]

I like to start my courses in energy economics and environmental economics by asking some question like Which energy source, e.g. gas, coal, nuclear, oil, renewables had the largest absolute increase in world wide energy consumption between the years 2000 und 2016? And then show some data. Below you can see ... [Read more...]

Recently, I have written and hosted several multi-user Shiny apps. One example, is Taddle that runs on my server at http://taddle.mathematik.uni-ulm.de. Taddle is a multi-user shiny app that offers a free and simple way to allocate seminar topics. (Nex... [Read more...]

One very important benefit of stronger environmental protection is to reduce the damaging effects of pollution on human health. In his very interesting article “The Consequences of Industrialization: Evidence from Water Pollution and Digestive Cance... [Read more...]

It is widely recognized that aggressive securitization of housing loans played a decisive role in the creating of a house price bubble in the US and the subsequent financial crisis. An open question is in how far financial experts on securitization wer... [Read more...]

Nowadays, a lot of interesting time series data is freely available that allows us to compare important economic, social and environmental trends across countries. I feel that one can learn a lot by surfing through the data sections on the websites of... [Read more...]

How much pollution reduction do we get from a MWh electricity produced by wind or solar power? In principle, this corresponds to the avoided pollution of a fossil fuel plant that reduces its output due to the higher production of renewable electricity.... [Read more...]