Modeling Competition over Multiple Variables under Limited Consumer Awareness*

When analyzing firm competition over two strategic variables (e.g., quality and price), it is important to decide whether to model it as a one-stage or a two-stage game. Our analysis focuses on markets in which consumers are not aware of all alternatives. We find that, if consumers are sufficiently unaware, both the one-stage and the two-stage equilibria of the game that explicitly models limited awareness are close to the one-stage equilibrium of the standard game, which assumes full awareness. Therefore, markets in which consumers have limited awareness can be studied with standard models, provided that the one-stage game is analyzed.     

An Abortion Based Search Method for Optimal Coalition Structure Generation

Group Decision and Negotiation - The Coalition Structure Generation (CSG) problem is a partitioning of a set of agents into exhaustive and disjoint subsets to maximize social welfare. This...     

The Struggle to Sustain Agriculture in EU Southern Neighbourhood Partners: Improving Data and Policies

The agricultural sector in the EU Southern Neighbourhood Partners (SNP) is struggling to respond to sustainability challenges. It needs stronger policies to deliver balanced sustainability outcomes in economic, social and environmental terms. Based on recent information and a structured assessment of the impacts of prevailing public policies on the sustainability of agriculture in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Turkey, carried out within the Sustainmed project ( https://sustainmed.iamm.fr ), we conclude that several factors contribute to the struggles in strengthening sustainability functions of agriculture in these countries. In the main, there is a lack of policy coherence toward sustainability uncovered by the dual, unbalanced consideration given to different sustainability factors in the study countries: pure economic factors largely prevail over factors related to resource conservation and social and cultural values, these latter factors being a precondition for long-term economic growth. Consequently, there is a genuine need for a more consistent vision of sustainability issues in future policy agendas, including better data systems and specific policies to incentivise sustainable agriculture in the SNP; as the challenge over the coming decades in these countries will be to increase agricultural production and productivity while at the same time managing natural resources sustainably. Findings can guide policymakers and other stakeholders in the agricultural sector to identify pathways towards sustaining agriculture in the SNP.