Franchise and the transport market: a new threat from Brussels

Contrary to the general liberalisation of transport policy that has followed in the European Union for some years now, a proposal is circulating in the Council and Parliament that would reverse all the gains that have been achieved from deregulation of bus and train services. It would return effective decisions to'competent authorities'and it would drive out competent managers as they lost the freedom to manage.     

Staring at the Abyss: a neurocognitive grounded agent-based model of collective-risk social dilemma under the threat of environmental disaster

Increasingly visible climate change consequences challenge carbon-based economies worldwide. While expert knowledge on climate change percolates through political initiatives and public awareness, its translation into large-scale policy actions appears limited. Climate change consequences unequally target regions, countries and social classes, a vital issue for social cooperation. When facing an imminent ecological collapse, in which conditions can self-interested agents gain environmental awareness and settle on a sustainable path of actions when their knowledge of the imminent collapse is bounded? This cooperation emerges from the interaction between individuals and the interaction of various cognitive processes within individuals. This article develops an agent-based model for this emergence of cooperation enriched with the Agent Zero neurocognitive grounded cognitive architecture. We investigate when agents endowed with deliberative, affective and social modules can settle on actions that safeguard their environment through numerical simulations. Our results show that cooperation on sustainable actions is the strongest when the system is at the edge of collapse. Policy measures that increase the environment’s resilience become internalized by the agents and undermine awareness of the ecological catastrophe. Depending on the cognitive channels activated, agent behaviors and reactions to specific interventions significantly vary. Our analysis suggests that taking different cognitive channels, deliberative, affective, social, and others into account, significantly impact results. The complexity of agent cognition deserves more attention to assess parameter sensitivity in social simulation models.

     

Voluntary internalisations facing the threat of a pollution tax

This paper investigates how the threat of a pollution tax fosters voluntary arrangements under private information and how such arrangements (of the take-it-or-leave-it type) will look like. The objective is (i), to address a topical and policy relevant problem, and (ii), to highlight that the optimal contracts exhibit substantial variations, degrees of complexity and uncommon features. If the pollutee offers an arrangement (and this is the more likely and also more interesting case) the spectrum of solutions covers six different cases: 'no distortion at the top', 'no distortion at the bottom', 'no distortion in the interior' and a boundary solution (a pseudo contract of duplicating the tax outcome) applicable either in all instances of the agent's benefit or coupled with one of the conventional mechanisms. If the polluter offers a contract, the optimal incentive scheme is countervailing with the consequence that the signs of the payments are reversed, that the property of no distortion holds at both ends and that the polluter's best strategy is to duplicate the tax outcome if the actual damage is around the expected value. The government's threat encourages contracting and improves the allocation beyond what an actual intervention could achieve. This provides a potential role for governments in an otherwise Coasean framework. Received: 28 March 2003, Accepted: 10 October 2005 JEL Classification: D62, D82 Both authors acknowledge (exceptionally) helpful and detailed comments from an anonymous referee and suggestions from an associate editor of the journal.     

Conflict analysis and compromise strategies in integrated spatial systems

This paper aims at showing the potential of multiple objective analysis for analyzing conflicts in a spatial-economic-environmental system. After a brief introduction to interactive approaches to multiple objective decision models, a conceptual framework for an interregional system will be designed, while next an operational application will be given. Various empirical results of an interregional model for the Netherlands will be presented.     

报复性反倾销及中国报复性威胁缺位的探讨

中国已成为全球被反倾销起诉次数最多的国家之一,严重制约了我国某些产业对外出口的健康发展,报复性反倾销对减少被反倾销起诉具有积极作用。基于全球反倾销数据,对世界主要贸易国之间的反倾销行为进行对比分析,探讨报复性威胁机制在抑制反倾销肯定性裁决上的作用。结合中印贸易间的反倾销数据,对报复性威胁机制的缺位和对策进一步分析探讨。     

Duration of UI periods and the perceived threat effect from labour market programmes

In this paper, we study whether the prospect of compulsory programme participation motivates individuals to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) system prior to participation. In some systems, individuals may experience very different risks of enrolment even when they face identical formal rules. If individuals learn that programme enrolment does not deterministically follow regulations, estimated effects based solely on institutional regulations may be downward biased. This means that the true effect of potential enrolment may be underestimated. We analyse data from the Danish labour market which includes information on a series of reforms that have enforced programme participation in return for unemployment benefit entitlement. First, we find that unemployed individuals do indeed have different risk of compulsory enrolment even when regulations indicate that the risk should be identical. Second, we find that individuals do react strongly and significantly to the prospect of programme enrolment. However, since individuals experience different risks of programme enrolment, the resulting response observed in individuals' hazard out of unemployment is also different as the unemployment spell progresses.     

Privatisation and vertical integration under a mixed duopoly

This paper analyses the privatisation of public firms when private firms may be vertically integrated with their suppliers. We consider a mixed duopoly with a vertically integrated public firm. The private firm bargains the price of the input with its supplier if they are not vertically integrated. We find that for a given bargaining power of the private firm, it vertically integrates with its supplier if goods are weak substitutes. We also find that there is less vertical integration in the mixed duopoly than in the private duopoly. Finally, in general, the public firm is privatised when goods are close substitutes and the bargaining power of the private firm is low enough.     

Workplace bargaining in hospitals and schools: threat or opportunity for the unions?

Government policy has aimed to encourage the development of workplace bargaining in both the education and health services. This article traces those developments and looks at trade union opposition to the shift from national to workplace bargaining     

Optimal restructuring under a political constraint

This paper considers the generalised second-best analytics of optimal restructuring under a political constraint, building on the modelling approach in Dehejia (1997, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 1552, Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, January 1997). It is shown that the second-best optimum entails administering the terms-of-trade shock fully at the initiation of the reform, just as in shock therapy, but that this must be supplemented with interventions in domestic factor markets. The effects of these interventions are to speed up the exit of the politically affected factor, labour, and to retard the exit of the other factor, capital, both of which serve to prop-up the wages of workers in the declining sector and hence address the political constraint. The results are in the spirit of the neoclassical theory of distortions and welfare: the optimal intervention targets the affected margin directly, in consonance with the ‘targeting’ principle of Bhagwati–Ramaswami–Johnson.     

Risk management under a prudential policy

In this paper, we study the structure of optimal contracts in banking system when there is no risk of moral hazard. We consider a risk management problem under a policy that reduces the excessive risk-taking behavior by making all banks bear part of the risk that they transfer to other parties in the market. First, we characterize the optimal solutions to the risk management problem, and, second, we find a necessary and sufficient condition under which the “risk of the tail events” will not be transferred. In particular, we will study the problem using two known risk measures, value at risk and conditional value at risk, and will show that in these cases, the optimal solutions are in the form of stop-loss policies.     

Retail market structure and the threat by the manufacturer to sell goods directly to the consumer

When a manufacturer and its retailers and consumers are spatially separated, the retailers’ market size may be limited by the manufacturer who provides consumers with an option to purchase goods directly from them. The manufacturer uses this tactic to increase profit when a few retailers dominate the market. The mill price of a manufacturer, that is, the price of the good at delivery from a manufacturer’s factory, is critical under these circumstances.If the manufacturer charges a franchise fee, thus absorbing the retailer’s profit, this fee is a function of the mill price. Mill price policy can be used to maximize profit on the sale of goods and collection of the franchise fee. The resulting retail market structure becomes preferable for the manufacturer and consumers since the manufacturer’s profit is larger, as is the quantity purchased, compared with a competitive equilibrium in which every firm entering the market area is assumed to move its location instantly without cost.     

Non-profit and for-profit entrepreneurship: a trade-off under liquidity constraint

Many non-profit enterprises are created ex-nihilo by individuals. The choice of non-profit status may be all the more surprising since this legal form denies founders the right to appropriate profits from the invested capital. The aim of this article is to understand the reasons why some individuals decide to create non-profit organisations instead of for-profit firms and do so under liquidity constraint. The model suggests that non-profit organisations enter at higher optimal levels of production, and are more constrained by access to credit. Moreover, non-profit entrepreneurs are more managerially efficient than their for-profit counterparts. However they cannot allocate capital as efficiently as the for-profit firms would do.     

Utility maximization under a shortfall risk constraint

The article analyzes optimal portfolio choice of utility maximizing agents in a general continuous-time financial market model under a joint budget and downside risk constraint. The risk constraint is given in terms of a class of convex risk measures. We do not impose any specific assumptions on the price processes of the underlying assets. We analyze under which circumstances the risk constraint is binding. We provide a closed-form solution to the optimization problem in a general semimartingale framework. For a complete market, the wealth maximization problem is equivalent to a dynamic portfolio optimization problem.     

Production under uncertainty: a simulation study

In this paper we model production technology in a state-contingent framework. Our model analyzes production under uncertainty without being explicit about the nature of producer risk preferences. In our model producers’ risk preferences are captured by the risk-neutral probabilities they assign to the different states of nature. Using a state-general state-contingent specification of technology we show that rational producers who encounter the same stochastic technology can make significantly different production choices. Further, we develop an econometric methodology to estimate the risk-neutral probabilities and the parameters of stochastic technology when there are two states of nature and only one of which is observed. Finally, we simulate data based on our state-general state-contingent specification of technology. Biased estimates of the technology parameters are obtained when we apply conventional ordinary least squares estimator on the simulated data.     

Robustness as a corporate objective under uncertainty

This paper examines the nature of the objective function of the firm when operating under conditions of uncertainty. Robustness is presented as a purposeful maximand for decision making both under conditions of certainty and uncertainty - a robust decision being one in which the decision maker retains the maximum flexibility with regard to future decisions after an initial decision has been made. Its incorporation within a managerial objective function provides a measurable scale for making choices between alternative courses of action, including under conditions of internal organizational conflict and environmental reaction by other decision makers.     

Union threat and non-union employment: A natural experiment on the use of temporary employment in British firms

This paper presents the first empirical evidence on the effect of the threat of unionisation on the use of a predominantly non-union type of employment, i.e. temporary employment. The identification strategy exploits an exogenous variation in union threat induced in the UK by new legislation enabling unions to obtain recognition even against the will of the management. The analysis finds no evidence of an effect on the probability that a firm employs fixed-term workers, and some weak evidence of a negative effect on the probability of using agency workers. Furthermore, estimates of the effect on the share of temporary employment are negative and statistically insignificant. Overall, therefore, there is no support for the hypothesis that firms under the threat of unionisation are more likely to use this type of non-union employment.     

Stochastic volatility model under a discrete mixture-of-normal specification

This paper investigates the properties of a linearized stochastic volatility (SV) model originally from Harvey et al. (Rev Econ Stud 61:247–264, 1994) under an extended flexible specification (discrete mixtures of normal). General closed form expressions for the moment conditions are derived. We show that our proposed model captures various tail behavior in a more flexible way than the Gaussian SV model, and it can accommodate certain correlation structure between the two innovations. Rather than using likelihood-based estimation methods via MCMC, we use an alternative procedure based on the characteristic function (CF). We derive analytical expressions for the joint CF and present our estimator as the minimizer of the weighted integrated mean-squared distance between the joint CF and its empirical counterpart (ECF). We complete the paper with an empirical application of our model to three stock indices, including S&P 500, Dow Jones 30 Industrial Average index and Nasdaq Composite index. The proposed model captures the dynamics of the absolute returns well and presents some consistent and supportive evidence for the Taylor effect and Machina effect.     

Profitability under an Open versus a Closed System

This paper explores the conditions under which a monopolist selling a system consisting of a main component and differentiated secondary components can increase profits by allowing competition in the aftermarket for the secondary components. Opening the system in this fashion can increase profits by giving consumers an added incentive to incur the setup cost of purchasing the main component. This paper extends the second-sourcing literature by showing the explicit effects of various parameters of demand on the decision to open the system. The results show that an open system is likely to be more profitable than a closed one when demand for the system is more elastic, when secondary-component variety is more valued, and when the share of the main component in the total system budget of the consumer is high.