Complementarity between water pricing, water rights and local water governance: A Bayesian analysis of choice behaviour of farmers in the Krishna river basin, India

To ensure efficient water allocation and use, policy designers have adopted various strategies, including price setting, decentralising irrigation water management or improving water rights. Most of these strategies have been applied individually, without considering the complementary relationships between them. This paper uses a discrete choice model to analyse the scope for combinations of tools for irrigation water demand management and farmers' acceptance of these. In terms of local irrigation water governance, the presence or absence of collective irrigation water management, in the form of a Water Users Association, is considered. Water rights are specified in terms of the duration and quality of the entitlement and its transferability. Finally, four types of water pricing methods (area, crop, block and volumetric pricing) are considered. Using a choice experiment, we elicit the most preferred water pricing method, under different water rights situations, at different price levels and under various contexts for local irrigation water governance. Our results indicated that under conditions of improved water rights, preference for volumetric pricing increases, whilst the presence of a Water Users Association reduces this preference. Furthermore, it was found that using an appropriate combination of water demand management tools considerably increases the willingness to pay for a change in scenario.     

An evolutionary model of energy transitions with interactive innovation-selection dynamics

We develop a stylized application of a new evolutionary model to study an energy transition in electricity production. The framework describes a population of boundedly rational electricity producers who decide each period on the allocation of profits among different energy technologies. They tend to invest in below-average cost energy technologies, while also devoting a small fraction of profits to alternative technological options and research on recombinant innovation. Energy technologies are characterized by costs falling with cumulative investments. Without the latter, new technologies have no chance to become cost competitive. We study the conditions under which a new energy technology emerges and technologies coexist. In addition, we determine which investment heuristics are optimal in the sense of minimizing the total cost of electricity production. This is motivated by the idea that, while diversity contributes to system adaptability (innovation) and resilience to unforeseen contingencies (keeping options open), a high cost will discourage investments in it.     

Platform thinking for services: the case of human resources

This paper tests the utility of platform thinking, a design principle that has so far been applied to product development yet under-researched in service settings, for improving the value of services. A key principle of platform thinking is to balance the reuse of service components with the heterogeneity in user needs. Tuning services to specific user needs is valuable, but differentiating services when user needs are homogeneous may decrease service quality and increase cost. Using data from 676 human resource management services, this study finds that the service value is highest when the service provision is matched with the commonality potential of the services. The results indicate that using the wrong delivery channel decreases the service value which eventually could decrease the service value for an organization's external customers. These empirical findings demonstrate the relevance of platform thinking for service design and challenges conventional design criteria used for optimizing service delivery.     

Internalising the costs of fragmentation and nutrient deposition in spatial planning: Extending a decision support tool for the Netherlands

The Land Use Scanner (LUS) is a decision support system for land use planning that is widely used in the Netherlands. The model yields solutions that have a high resolution (500×500 m) and reflect economic equilibrium in the land market, in which eighteen types of land use and nine aggregated habitat types competitively bid for locations. Here, an extension to the LUS is presented that enables the internalisation of environmental externalities. The focus in this study is on two important externalities, namely ammonia emissions from agriculture and habitat fragmentation. We simulate four IPCC-based land use scenarios and assess the level of fragmentation of the nine habitat types. We also perform sensitivity analyses in the most market-oriented scenario on the effectiveness of market-based instruments in promoting more efficient land allocation. The simulation results suggest that particularly the habitat type ‘rain-fed mires and bogs’ is susceptible to fragmentation. The sensitivity analyses show that internalising the damage costs of fragmentation resulted in smaller changes in land allocation than internalising those of nitrogen deposition. For both instruments, the policy effort was large in relation to the efficiency gains in land allocation.     

‘Eating the bread out of their mouth’: Antwerp's export trade and generalized institutions, 1544–5

This article studies the distribution of exports from mid‐sixteenth‐century Antwerp at the individual and group level (grouped by merchant origin). Recently, scholars have argued that sixteenth‐century Antwerp, and in its wake a series of other cities, hosted an open‐access market as a result of an evolution towards open‐access institutions. However, the direct effect of this institutional change on merchant enterprise is hard to measure. Relying on detailed tax records, preferences at the individual merchant level for particular destinations and commodities are documented, to evaluate whether exporters had equal chances in Antwerp's export market. A few exporters had large export shares next to a multitude of smaller merchants. The exports of these smaller merchants to distant destinations and their participation in the export of important products demonstrate a fairly level commercial playing field with regard to their larger‐scale colleagues. Foreign traders had access to trade in Low Countries products, while local merchants were active in the export of major transit products. The activities of the latter group are particularly important; contrary to previous literature, Low Countries traders did not differ in their preference for home‐grown products.     

Multivariate GARCH models: a survey

This paper surveys the most important developments in multivariate ARCH‐type modelling. It reviews the model specifications and inference methods, and identifies likely directions of future research. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Country and consumer segmentation: multi-level latent class analysis of financial product ownership

The financial services sector has internationalized over the last few decades. Important differences and similarities in financial behavior can be anticipated between both consumers within a particular country and those living in different countries. For companies in this market, the appropriate choice between strategic options and the resulting international performance may critically depend on the cross-national market structure of the various financial products. Insight into country segments and international consumer segments based on domain-specific behavioral variables will therefore be of key strategic importance. We present a multi-level latent class framework for obtaining simultaneously such country and consumer segments. In an empirical study, we apply this methodology and several alternative modeling approaches to data on ownership of eight financial products. Information is available for 15 European countries, with a sample size of about 1000 consumers per country. We find that both country segments and consumer segments are highly interpretable. Also, consumer segmentation is related to demographic variables such as age and income. Our conclusions feature implications, both academic and managerial, and directions for future research.     

Terminating Piracy or Legitimate Seed Saving? The Use of Copy-Protection Technology in Seeds

This article analyses the strategies of the agro-biotechnology industry to control and exploit plant-genetic knowledge, and the dilemmas that these strategies involve. The replicability of plants limits markets for commercial seeds, as it enables farmers to reproduce seeds themselves. The industry has therefore invented genetic-engineering techniques that will block the replicability of plants, and will effectively prevent farmers from saving their own seeds. However, this copy-protection technique— dubbed 'Terminator'—is widely condemned in farming communities. The technology overrules intellectual property laws that exempt seed saving for private use, and it is likely to have a negative impact on medium-sized and small farming systems in developing countries. In this article it is argued that while copy protection in plants may expand seed markets, it may also seriously damage the reputation of the biotechnology industry. Corporate scientists and strategists should be more open to a public discussion about the fairness and legitimacy of seed production for private use.     

Voluntary Disclosure of Bad News

Abstract:   This paper shows that in a voluntary disclosure environment entailing both a fixed disclosure cost and a variable proprietary cost, partial disclosure equilibria may arise in which firms voluntarily disclose bad private information to the public. Furthermore, it is shown that such equilibria may arise more frequently as the threat of incuring proprietary cost increases and/or the proprietary cost itself increases.