The article discusses the possible cost savings of contracting out refuse collection in the Netherlands. According to foreign econometric studies, contracting out refuse collection leads to cost savings of approximately 20%. Our findings indicate that similar cost savings apply to the...

Elbert Dijkgraaf defended his PhD-thesis 'Regulating the Dutch Waste Market' at 5 november 2004. This thesis analyses whether the risen costs of waste collection and treatment can be diminished by changing policy instruments. The thesis shows that user fees are very effective in reducing the...

We study Nash equilibria of joint production games under a mixed output sharing rule in which part of the output (the mixing parameter) is shared in proportion to inputs and the rest according to exogenously determined shares. This rule includes proportional sharing and equal sharing as special...

Endogenous order of moves in quantity choice is analyzed in a mixed oligopoly with one public firm, n domestic private firms and m foreign private firms. We consider the observable delay game of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990) in the context of a quantity setting mixed oligopoly where firms first...

We model the organization of the firm as a type of artificial neural network in a duopoly framework. The firm plays a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma type game, but also must learn to map environmental signals to demand parameters. We study the prospects for cooperation given the need for the firm...

This paper presents the stylized facts of open source software innovation and provides empirical evidence on the impact of increased competition by OSS on the innovative activity in the software industry. Furthermore, we introduce a simple formal model that captures the innovation impact of OSS...

Though widespread, the practice of public subsidies for cultural activity lacks a rigorous and consistent economic rationale. We analyze a canonical market structure that characterizes much cultural activity: the competition of mass-produced goods with heterogeneous non- standardized goods that...

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. Earlier studies frequently report contradictory estimates of the response of company...

Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

Considering two potential sources of income (public grants and ticket revenues),we have defined a theoretical model where the public agency is the principal and the manager of the museum is the agent. This model allows us to design the optimal contract between both sides and thus to establish...