Building on a model of the interaction of risk-averse frms that compete in forward and spot markets, we develop an empirical strategy to test whether oligopolistic frms use forward contracts for strategic motives, for risk-hedging, or for both. An increase in the number of players weakens the...

In economic environments, decision-makers may strategically delay irreversible investments to learn from the actions of others creating socially suboptimal outcomes. We investigate if and how communication mitigates the strategic delay in investment timings. Players choose when to invest in a...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

We study the impact of audits on water conservation, distinguishing between the information and technological components. We observe water consumption for up to 18 months for 10,000 households in the South East of England who received the visit of a so-called Green Doctor. We find that...

The energy sector is one of the most important in the world, so that time series fluctuations in leading energy sources have been analysed widely. As the leading energy commodities are traded on international stock exchanges, the analysis of the fluctuations in stock and financial derivatives...

There is substantial empirical evidence that energy and financial markets are closely connected. As one of the most widely-used energy resources worldwide, natural gas has a large daily trading volume. In order to hedge the risk of natural gas spot markets, a large number of hedging strategies...

The production of natural gas is strongly increasing around the world. Long-run negative external effects of extraction are understudied and often ignored in social) cost-benefit analyses. One important example is that natural gas extraction leads to soil subsidence and subsequent induced...

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. In many of these problems, players are organized according to either a hierarchical structure or a levels structure that restrict players ́possibilities to cooperate. In this paper, we...

The Shapley value of a cooperative transferable utility game distributes the dividend of each coalition in the game equally among its members. Given exogenous weights for all players, the corresponding weighted Shapley value distributes the dividends proportionally to their weights. In this...