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2604.03209 2026-04-06 cs.SI cs.HC econ.GN q-fin.EC

Help Converts Newcomers, Not Veterans: Generalized Reciprocity and Platform Engagement on Stack Overflow

Lenard Strahringer, Sven Eric Prüß, Kai Riemer

Comments 39 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables. Working paper

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英文摘要

Generalized reciprocity -- the tendency to help others after receiving help oneself -- is widely theorized as a mechanism sustaining cooperation on online knowledge-sharing platforms. Yet robust empirical evidence from field settings remains surprisingly scarce. Prior studies relying on survey self-reports struggle to distinguish reciprocity from other prosocial motives, while observational designs confound reciprocity with baseline user activity, producing upward-biased estimates. We address these empirical challenges by developing a matched difference-in-differences survival analysis that leverages the temporal structure of help-seeking and help-giving on Stack Overflow. Using Cox proportional hazards models on over 21 million questions, we find that receiving an answer significantly increases a user's propensity to help others, but this effect is concentrated among newcomers and declines with platform experience. This pattern suggests that reciprocity functions primarily as a contributor-recruitment mechanism, operating before platform-specific incentives such as reputation and status displace the general moral impulse to reciprocate. Response time moderates the effect, but non-linearly: reciprocity peaks for answers arriving within a re-engagement window of roughly thirty to sixty minutes. These findings contribute to the theory of generalized reciprocity and have implications for platform design.

2604.03102 2026-04-06 econ.GN q-fin.EC

Nonlinear dynamics of educational choices under social influence and endogenous returns

Andrea Caravaggio, Marco Catola, Silvia Leoni

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英文摘要

Decisions to pursue higher education are not fully explained by economic incentives, with social influence and peer effects playing a crucial, yet dynamically understudied, role. This paper develops a theoretical non-linear dynamics model analysing the interplay between economic returns and social pressure. We model a heterogeneous population of "Followers" who exhibit imitative behaviour, and "Positional Agents" who display counter-adaptive behaviour. Agents' preferences for education evolve endogenously, reacting to both aggregate enrolment and an endogenous wage premium that declines with the supply of educated workers. The aggregate dynamics are governed by a one-dimensional non-linear map. By assuming fixed population structure. we show that the social conflict between pro-cyclical imitative forces and counter-cyclical positional forces can destabilize the steady state, generating a period-doubling route to chaos. These complex, endogenous fluctuations in enrolment emerge only for intermediate, heterogeneous population mixes, while homogeneous populations remain stable. We argue that this instability represents a significant coordination failure, scrambling economic signals and hindering rational long-term planning for both students and institutions, making it a key policy concern. Finally, we also extend the result to the case where the population structure is endogenous.

2604.03025 2026-04-06 econ.EM econ.GN q-fin.EC

UK Income Inequality and Taxation, 2000--2023: A $κ$-generalised Distribution Analysis

Samuel Forbes

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英文摘要

We analyse the UK income distribution from 2000 to 2023 using HMRC annual percentile data for both pre-tax and post-tax income. We fit a prefactor-adjusted $κ$-generalised specification to the data by weighted non-linear least squares and use inverse transform sampling to generate simulated income populations. The results suggest a redistribution of income shares over the period: the bottom 40\% appears to have increased its share, the middle-upper part of the distribution (50th--90th percentiles) lost share, the top 10\% remained broadly stable, and the top 1\% increased its share of pre-tax income. Because the modified specification is defined only above a positive threshold, conclusions concerning the lower tail should be interpreted with some caution. Using simulated 2023 pre-tax incomes to examine tax reform scenarios, we find that revenue-equivalent tax increases on high-income earners must be more than four times as large as comparable increases on lower-income earners. This suggests that, despite increased concentration at the top, the UK tax base remains driven primarily by the large number of taxpayers outside the very top of the distribution.

2604.02909 2026-04-06 math.OC q-fin.TR

Concave Continuation: Linking Routing to Arbitrage

Ruichao Jiang, Long Wen

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英文摘要

We extend AMM trade functions to negative inputs via the \textit{concave continuation}, derived from the invariance of the local conservation law under allocation direction flips. This unifies routing and arbitrage into a single problem. We extend the one-hop transfer algorithm proposed in \cite{jiang} to this setting.

2604.02862 2026-04-06 q-fin.MF cs.GT

When cooperation is beneficial to all agents

Alessandro Doldi, Marco Frittelli, Marco Maggis

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英文摘要

Within a general semimartingale framework, we study the relationship between collective market efficiency and individual rationality. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of (possibly zero-sum) exchanges among agents that strictly increase their indirect utilities and characterize this condition in terms of the compatibility between agents' preferences and collective pricing measures. The framework applies to both continuous- and discrete-time models and clarifies when cooperation leads to a strict improvement in each participating agent's indirect utility.

2604.02549 2026-04-06 q-fin.ST cs.LG

Financial Anomaly Detection for the Canadian Market

Luigi Caputi, Nicholas Meadows

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英文摘要

In this work we evaluate the performance of three classes of methods for detecting financial anomalies: topological data analysis (TDA), principal component analyis (PCA), and Neural Network-based approaches. We apply these methods to the TSX-60 data to identify major financial stress events in the Canadian stock market. We show how neural network-based methods (such as GlocalKD and One-Shot GIN(E)) and TDA methods achieve the strongest performance. The effectiveness of TDA in detecting financial anomalies suggests that global topological properties are meaningful in distinguishing financial stress events.

2603.03260 2026-04-06 physics.soc-ph econ.GN q-fin.EC

Does Entry of Food-and-Drink Establishments Raise Local House Prices? Event-Study Evidence from London

Wanqi Liu, Rong Zhao

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英文摘要

Restaurants, cafes, pubs, and takeaways are among the most visible markers of neighborhood change, yet whether their arrival is capitalised into nearby housing values remains empirically unsettled. We assemble a London-wide panel linking Land Registry prices, non-domestic EPC lodgement timings for food-and-drink establishments, and neighborhood amenity measures at the LSOA level. Our preferred annual event-study design defines treatment as the first clean-onset year in which an LSOA records at least two eligible EPC lodgements for food-and-drink establishments, after a two-year lookback with no prior entries. In this specification, pre-trend tests are not rejected in either the stacked or Sun-Abraham estimators, and log house prices rise gradually from about 0.5% in the event year to roughly 3.4--3.7% by years four and five. The results are consistent with local amenity capitalization following commercial entry, while remaining appropriately cautious about endogenous siting and concurrent redevelopment.

2508.13966 2026-04-06 q-fin.MF

Market Viability and Completeness for Multinomial Models

Nahuel I. Arca

Comments 18 pages, 5 figures

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英文摘要

In this paper we aim to study viability and completeness in finite markets. In order to do that, we characterize the set of equivalent martingale measures of two-period markets as convex combinations of a finite number of martingale measures. We provide an algorithm for finding such measures, that can be applied in other problems of convex geometry, and represents the starting point for a study of such characterizations of convex sets' intersections. We apply these results to the study of a discrete-time version of the Korn-Kreer-Lenssen model, and give an example of the limitations of using discrete-time models to understand continuous-time ones.

2508.06162 2026-04-06 econ.GN q-fin.EC

To Each Their Own: Heterogeneity in Worker Preferences for and Responses to Peer Information

Zhi Hao Lim

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英文摘要

Information about peers' performance is pervasive in workplaces, yet its effects on worker behavior are mixed. We show that a key reason is that workers differ in how they value such information. In a real-effort experiment with 793 workers, we elicit willingness-to-pay for peer information delivered either before or after the task. We document substantial heterogeneity in demand for peer information: some workers are indifferent, some prefer to avoid it before the task, and others value it more as their relative performance increases. These differences strongly predict effort responses to peer information. Notably, 15% of workers would pay to avoid information ex ante due to stress and exhibit no productivity gains from it. We further show that uniform feedback policies can impose welfare losses on such workers, while tailoring the timing of peer information increases welfare by up to 48%. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for heterogeneous information preferences when designing workplace feedback policies.

2312.16205 2026-04-06 econ.GN q-fin.EC

Shifting Beliefs Changing Behavior: Experimental Evidence on Sanitation from India

Sania Ashraf, Cristina Bicchieri, Upasak Das, Alex Shpenev

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英文摘要

Open defecation, which is linked to poor health outcomes and lower cognitive ability has been widespread in India. Improved sanitation practice generates local health externalities, which implies that the returns to private toilet usage depend on community wide compliance. Therefore, beliefs about others toilet usage behavior may influence both sanitation choices and the perceived value of residing in areas with lower prevalence of open defecation. This paper evaluates a randomized, intervention in peri-urban Tamil Nadu designed to shift social expectations regarding sanitation practice. The intervention combines descriptive norm messaging, community engagement, and information provision to increase perceived prevalence and approval of toilet usage. The findings indicate a significant increase in toilet access in the intervention areas by 8 percentage points and consistent toilet usage by 6 to 7 percentage points relative to control areas. The effects are robust to potential bias due to disruption due to local socio-political protest and the COVID 19 pandemic during the study period. We also find significant increase in empirical expectations (beliefs about the prevalence of toilet usage) and normative expectations (beliefs about its approval). Mediation analysis indicates that the improvement in toilet access and usage is substantially driven by changes in these social expectations. We further observe significant increase in the willingness to pay among respondents for residing in open defecation free surroundings, suggestive of an increased perceived valuation of cleaner sanitation environments because of the intervention. The findings underscore the need for norm-centric interventions to propel change in beliefs and achieve long-term and sustainable sanitation behavior.

2212.00292 2026-04-06 econ.GN cs.CR cs.MA q-fin.EC q-fin.TR

Economics of NFTs: The Value of Creator Royalties

Brett Hemenway Falk, Gerry Tsoukalas, Niuniu Zhang

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英文摘要

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are transforming how content creators, such as artists, price and sell their work. A key feature of NFTs is the inclusion of royalties, which grant creators a share of all future resale proceeds. Although widely used, critics argue that sophisticated speculators, who dominate NFT markets, simply price in royalties upfront, neutralizing their impact. We show this intuition holds only under perfect, frictionless markets. Under more realistic market conditions, royalties enable creators to capitalize on the presence of speculators in at least three ways: They can enable risk sharing (under risk aversion), mitigate information asymmetry (when speculators are better informed), and unlock price discrimination benefits (in multi-unit settings). Moreover, in all three cases, royalties meaningfully expand trade, implying increased transaction volume for platforms. These results offer testable predictions that can guide both empirical research and platform design.

1907.01437 2026-04-06 math.FA math.PR q-fin.MF

Compact embeddings for spaces of forward rate curves

Stefan Tappe

Comments 9 pages

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Journal ref
Abstract and Applied Analysis, vol. 2013, Article ID 709505, 6 pages
英文摘要

The goal of this note is to prove a compact embedding result for spaces of forward rate curves. As a consequence of this result, we show that any forward rate evolution can be approximated by a sequence of finite dimensional processes in the larger state space.