In this methodological study we analyze price adjustment processes in multi-period laboratory asset markets with five distinct fundamental value (FV) regimes in a unified framework. Minimizing the effect of between-treatment variations we run markets with deterministically decreasing, constant, randomly fluctuating and—as main innovation—markets with deterministically increasing FVs. We find (i) efficient pricing in markets with constant FVs, (ii) overvaluation in markets with decreasing FVs, and (iii) undervaluation in markets with increasing FVs. (iv) Markets with randomly fluctuating fundamentals show overvaluation when FVs predominantly decline and undervaluation when FVs are mostly upward-sloping. Finally, we document that (v) bid-ask spreads and volatility of price changes are positively correlated with mispricing across regimes. The main contribution of the paper is to provide clean comparisons between distinct FV regimes, in particular between markets with increasing FVs and other regimes.

We review bubble measures which are commonly used in the experimental asset market literature. It seems sensible to require that measures of mispricing should (i) relate the fundamental value and price, (ii) be monotone in the difference between fundamental value and price, and (iii) be independent of the total number of periods and the absolute level of fundamental value. We show that none of the measures currently used fulfills all these criteria. To facilitate comparability across different experimental settings with different parameterizations we propose two alternative measures which fulfill all evaluation criteria. The measure for mispricing, RAD (relative absolute deviation), is calculated by averaging absolute differences between the (volume-weighted) mean price and the fundamental value across all periods and normalizing it with the absolute value of the average FV of the market. The measure for overvaluation, RD (relative deviation), is calculated analogously, but uses raw difference between (volume-weighted) mean prices and fundamental values. Hence, it provides information on whether the mispricing stems from over- or undervaluation of the asset.

We run laboratory experiments to analyze the impact of prior investment experience on price efficiency in asset markets. Before subjects enter the asset market they gain either no, positive, or negative investment experience in an investment game. To get a comprehensive picture about the role of experience we implement two asset market designs. One is prone to inefficient pricing, exhibiting bubble and crash patterns, while the other exhibits efficient pricing. We find that (i) both, positive and negative, experience gained in the investment game lead to efficient pricing in both market settings. Further, we show that (ii) the experience effect dominates potential effects triggered by positive and negative sentiment generated by the investment game. We conjecture that experiencing changing price paths in the investment game can create a higher sensibility on changing fundamentals (through higher salience) among subjects in the subsequently run asset market.

Biodynamic farming is a growing branch of organic farming which uses various so-called biodynamic preparations with the aim to enhance plant growth and soil quality. These preparations comprise plant parts fermented in animal sheaths (e.g., cow intestines or deer bladders) which are then applied to manures and composts before applying to the field (compost preparations). Two special preparations based on manure and silica are applied to the crops as field sprays (spray preparations). The effect of these biodynamic preparations, however, is a matter of debate. In a long-term experiment over 27 yrs, within an organic crop rotation, the use of biodynamic compost preparations has recently been shown to impact the soil biological community. Using the same experiment, we investigated whether these soil-level effects also displayed in agronomic parameters of arable crops. We found that the use of biodynamic compost preparations, when compared with farmyard manure (FYM) compost application without preparations, had no effect on yield in any of the investigated crops (spring wheat, winter wheat, oats, winter rye, faba bean, potatoes, maize, and grass/clover), or when data from all crops were pooled. Temporal yield stability of spring wheat and grass/clover was also unaffected by the biodynamic compost preparations. The application of FYM compost, however, led to significant increases in both yield and yield stability as compared to the non-fertilized control. We conclude that while biodynamic compost preparations did influence biological processes in the soil, they did not increase the crop yields in our long-term trial.

The European Congenital Heart Surgeons Association (ECHSA) Congenital Database (CD) is the second largest clinical pediatric and congenital cardiac surgical database in the world and the largest in Europe, where various smaller national or regional databases exist. Despite the dramatic increase in interventional cardiology procedures over recent years, only scattered national or regional databases of such procedures exist in Europe. Most importantly, no congenital cardiac database exists in the world that seamlessly combines both surgical and interventional cardiology data on an international level; therefore, the outcomes of surgical and interventional procedures performed on the same or similar patients cannot easily be tracked, assessed, and analyzed. In order to fill this important gap in our capability to gather and analyze information on our common patients, ECHSA and The Association for European Paediatric and Congenital Cardiology (AEPC) have embarked on a collaborative effort to expand the ECHSA-CD with a new module designed to capture data about interventional cardiology procedures. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the concept, the structure, and the function of the new AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD, as well as the potentially valuable synergies provided by the shared interventional and surgical analyses of outcomes of patients. The new AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD will allow centers to have access to robust surgical and transcatheter outcome data from their own center, as well as robust national and international aggregate outcome data for benchmarking. Each contributing center or department will have access to their own data, as well as aggregate data from the AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD. The new AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD will allow cardiology centers to have access to aggregate cardiology data, just as surgical centers already have access to aggregate surgical data. Comparison of surgical and catheter interventional outcomes could potentially strengthen decision processes. A study of the wealth of information collected in the database could potentially also contribute toward improved early and late survival, as well as enhanced quality of life of patients with pediatric and/or congenital heart disease treated with surgery and interventional cardiac catheterization across Europe and the world.