In this paper we discuss experimental evidence for two different institutional approaches to a possible resolution of the fundamental conflict between social welfare maximization and individual utility maximization. The basic workhorse for modelling this conflict is the voluntary contribution of...

We assess the monetary value of the noise damage, caused by aircraft noise nuisance around Amsterdam Airport, as the sum of hedonic house price differentials and a residual cost component. The residual costs are assessed from a survey, including an ordinal life satisfaction scale, on which...

This paper has a twofold objective. First, we develop a new method to assess the monetary value for individuals of external effects. The method makes use of an ordinal index of life satisfaction as scored by individual respondents who are subjected in varying intensity to the external effect....

This paper presents a framework for analysing spatial aspects of environmental policies in the regulation of trans-boundary externalities. A spatial price equilibrium model for two regions is constructed, where interactions between these regions can occur via trade and transport, via mutual...

This paper analyses the adoption of energy-efficiency enhancing technologies by heterogeneous firms. The fact that energy use does not only cause external environmental costs through pollution, but also directly affects the profitability of the firm and hence its behaviour on input and output...

In this paper we consider the problem of sharing water from a river among a group of agents (countries, cities, firms) located along the river. The benefit of each agent depends on the amount of water consumed by the agent. An allocation of the water among the agents is efficient when it...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...

In linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems with singular control cost matrix and/or singular transition matrix, we derive a reduction of the dimension of the Riccati matrix, simplifying iteration and solution. Employing a novel transformation, we show that, under a certain rank condition, the...

In the process of regulatory reform in the electric power industry, the mitigation of market power is one of the basic problems regulators have to deal with. We use experimental data to study the sources of market power with supply function competition, akin to the competition in wholesale...

An important question in the dynamic European wholesale markets for electricity is whether to define the geographical market at the level of an individual member state or more broadly. We show that if we currently take the traditional approach by considering for each member state whether there...