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Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in the private sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a unique cross-country data set, we suggest that awards serve as signals. Awards are more prevalent the more difficult the position and status of an individual is to observe due to an anonymous and globalized setting.

Museums have many different goals beyond efficiency such as social equity, financial revenue, attracting donors and gaining international, regional or local prestige. Various pricing schemes are being discussed with the aim of reaching these goals. The classical ones are entry prices and free entry. The museum club solution or exit donations allow for various additional goals. Each scheme has clear advantages and disadvantages. We propose an innovative pricing instrument: Exit prices, which are charged according to the time spent in a museum. This scheme has a number of notable advantages, in particular the better choice available to the visitors, which increases their satisfaction.

Academic economists today are caught in a "Publication Impossibility Theorem Systemʺ or PITS. To further their careers, they are required to publish in A-journals, but this is impossible for the vast majority because there are few slots open in such journals. Such academic competition is held to provide the right incentives for hard work, but there may be serious negative consequences: the wrong output may be produced in an inefficient way, the wrong people may be selected, and the losers may react in a harmful way. The paper suggests several ways for improvement.

In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improve environmental quality and thus individuals' well-being. However, how do individuals value the environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representing a new non-market valuation technique. The LSA builds on the recent development of subjective well-being research in economics and takes measures of reported life satisfaction as an empirical approximation to individual welfare. Micro-econometric life satisfaction functions are estimated taking into account environmental conditions along with income and other covariates. The estimated coefficients for the environmental good and income can then be used to calculate the implicit willingness-to-pay for the environmental good.

This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural experiment do provide behavioural evidence which is rare in such a controlled and life threatening event. The empirical results support that social norm such as women and children firstʺ survive in such an environment. We also observe that women of reproductive age have a higher probability of surviving among women. On the other hand, we observe that crew members used their information advantage and their better access to resources (e.g. lifeboats) to generate a higher probability of surviving. The paper also finds that passenger class, fitness, group size, and cultural background matter.

Coercion or negative sanctions to deter terrorism have little effect and in some important instances are even counterproductive, claims Frey (economics, U. of Zurich), and it is time to consider alternatives to the anti-terrorist policy undertaken by major powers throughout the world

Using the economic point of view for an analysis of phenomena related to artistic activities, Arts & Economics not only challenges widely held popular views, but also offers an alternative perspective to sociological or art historic approaches.The wide range of subjects presented are of current interest and, above all, relevant for cultural policy. The issues discussed include: institutions from festivals to "superstar" museums, different means of supporting the arts, including the question whether artistic creativity is undermined by public intervention, an investigation into art as an investment, the various approaches applied when valuing our cultural properties, or why, in a comparative perspective, direct voter participation in cultural policy is not antagonistic to artistic values