emissions between 1996 and 2001. Was this emission reduction just the fortuitous result of the major economic transformation undergone by those countries in the transition away from a centralized plan economy ? Or is the emission reduction rather a result of more stringent environmental policy ?...

This paper investigates the factors underlying the emergence of Research Cluster (RC), i.e. cooperation (or coordination of research efforts) through spatial proximity between public and private research teams. A ‘public lab’ and a ‘private lab’ interact in a two-stage game to decide on...

It is argued that compared with large countries, small countries rely more on trade and therefore they are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. The present paper extends this idea beyond the conventional trade openness measures by analyzing the relationship between country size and the...

The paper concerns a model of influence in which agents make their decisions on a certain issue. It is assumed that each agent is inclined to make a particular decision, but due to a possible influence of the others, his final decision may be different from his initial inclination. Since in...

The paper concerns a dynamic model of influence in which agents have to make a yes-no decision. Each agent has an initial opinion, which he may change during different phases of interaction, due to mutual influence among agents. The influence mechanism is assumed to be stochastic and to follow a...

We generalize a yes-no model of influence in a social network with a single step of mutual influence to a framework with iterated influence. Each agent makes an acceptance- rejection decision and has an inclination to say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Due to influence by others, an agent's...

The core of a cooperative game on a set of players N is one of the most popular concept of solution. When cooperation is restricted (feasible coalitions form a subcollection F of 2N), the core may become unbounded, which makes it usage questionable in practice. Our proposal is to make the core...

We study a stochastic model of influence where agents have yes-no inclinations on some issue, and opinions may change due to mutual influence among the agents. Each agent independently aggregates the opinions of the other agents and possibly herself. We study influence processes modelled by...

We study and compare two frameworks : a model of influence, and command games. In the influence model, in which players are to make a certain acceptance/rejection decision, due to influence of other players, the decision of a player may be different from his inclination. We study a relation...

In the paper, we study a relation between command games proposed by Hu and Shapley and an influence model. We show that our framework of influence is more general than the framework of the command games. We define several influence functions which capture the command structure. These functions...