Fairtrade certification aims at transferring wealth from the consumer to the farmer; however, coffee passes through many hands before reaching final consumers. Bringing together retail, wholesale, and stock market data, this study estimates how much more consumers are paying for...

For the European Union to realise its ambition of carbon neutrality, emissions from basic material production need to be reduced through low-carbon production processes, material efficiency and substitution, as well as enhanced recycling. Different reform options for the EU ETS are discussed...

Due to its technical complexity, the co-production of electricity generation and nuclear weapons, and its high fixed costs, nuclear power is a particularly complex commodity, which poses unusual challenges for state economic (or industrial, defense, innovation etc.) policy. As in other sectors,...

This paper highlights the strategic role that private quality standards play in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the producers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric...

We analyze a simple supply chain with one supplier, one retailer and uncertainty about market demand. Focusing on the incentives of the supplier and the retailer to enhance their private information about the actual market conditions, we show that choices on information acquisition are strategic...

Considering a vertical structure with perfectly competitive upstream firms that deliver a homogenous good to a differentiated retail duopoly, we show that upstream fixed costs may help to monopolize the downstream market. We find that downstream prices increase in upstream firms' fixed costs...

This paper examines how delivery tariffs and private quality standards are determined in vertical relations that are subject to asymmetric information. We consider an infinitely repeated game where an upstream firm sells a product to a downstream firm. In each period, the firms negotiate a...

Der Einsatz von Ethanol, erzeugt aus landwirtschaftlichen Grundstoffen, wird in vielen Ländern als vorrangige Form praktiziert, um fossile Kraftstoffe in einem gewissen Umfang zu substituieren. Dabei ist weltweit eine steigende Tendenz zu beobachten, und es entstehen durch den Aufbau eines...

Bisher stand bei den Reformen der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung die Finanzierungsseite im Vordergrund, nun will sich die Bundesregierung auf die Leistungsseite konzentrieren. Wie kann mehr Wettbewerb im Gesundheitswesen etabliert werden? Welche Erfahrungen wurden damit im Ausland gemacht?...