Government Policy and the Evolution of the Market for Dutch Daily Newspapers

This paper investigates whether governments can change market structures through interventions. We study the effects of four political events over the life cycle of the market for daily newspapers in the Netherlands. We find that policy measures meant to lower entry barriers in an expanding industry created new entry and increased survival chances for potential entrants and incumbent newspapers. Exit barrier enhancing policies to reduce concentration tendencies have not been successful.     

Awareness of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks' Dangers: Role of Internet Pricing Mechanisms

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks consist of overwhelming a server, a network or a Web site in order to paralyze its normal activity. The additional parameter in Distributed Denial of Service (DdoS) attacks is the distributing strategy. It means that DDoS attacks do not come from a single computer but stem from all accessible channels and servers. Consequences are multiple, ranging from system errors, temporary inability to access the Web site for normal users to challenging the actual reliability of the Internet. Despite this, Internet users show carelessness. The explanation lies in the specificities of DDoS attacks. We explore possibilities to raise users' awareness about the actual amplitude of problems caused by DDoS attacks. We suggest a careful examination of Internet pricing mechanisms and switching from flat to usage-constraining pricing schemes.     

Market Structures for U.S. Water Quality Trading

The use of transferable discharge permits as a water pollution control policy is rapidly increasing in the United States. Drawing on evidence from existing water quality trading programs, this paper provides a taxonomy of the forms that such markets take. Four main structures are identified: exchanges, bilateral negotiations, clearinghouses, and sole-source offsets. Each of these structures has its own strengths and weaknesses; none is optimal for all scenarios. Since market structure is largely determined by a program's rules, policy makers should be aware of the differences between these structures and the conditions under which each comes to be.     

Policy reform and productivity change in Chinese agriculture: A distance function approach

Agricultural policy reform has been an important source of change in the Chinese agricultural sector. The reforms led to productivity growth and helped China to pursue its self-sufficiency goal especially in the grain sector. In order to analyze whether observable productivity growth stems from technologically induced components or from the market induced parts, a multi-input–multi-output model is derived by using an econometric distance function framework. A decomposition allows to distinguish allocative effects, scale effects, technological change, and technical efficiency change. Data on farms in Zhejiang from 1986 to 2000 are used to analyze the impact of policy reform.