When procurement contracts are incomplete, they are frequently changed after the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder. This results in a final cost that differs from the initial price, and may involve significant transaction costs due to renegotiation. We propose a stylized model of bidding...

We consider a partnership game with two roles in which a large population of firms interact to carry out, say, R&D joint ventures. The partners have to build a common-property asset through a sequence of costly investments. Firms have access to a monitoring technology whose cost depends on the...

In order to regulate the proliferated bioprospecting and protect the biological diversity in the source countries, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) established a legal framework for the reciprocal transfer of biological materials between the interested parties in bioprospecting...

This paper explores the use of a micro-economic model to analyse the provisions and parties of bioprospecting contracts. It focuses on the pharmaceutical industry as the representative biodiversity buyer, presenting an original theoretical framework that explains the main contract...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naïvely update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors' opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

We analyze the relationship between the prices of ethanol, agricultural commodities and livestock in Nebraska, the U.S. second largest ethanol producer. The paper focuses on long-run relations and Granger causality linkages between ethanol and the other commodities. The analysis takes possible...

This paper examines the relationship between biofuels and commodity food prices in the U.S. from a new perspective. While a large body of literature has tried to explain the linkages between sample means and volatilities associated with ethanol and agricultural price returns, little is known...

In this paper, we compare two different representations of Framework Programs as affiliation network: 'One-mode networks' and 'Two-mode networks'. The aim of this article is to show that the choice of the representation has an impact on the analysis of the networks and on the results of the...

Regarding complex networks, one of the most relevant problems is to understand and to explore community structure. In particular it is important to define the network organization and the functions associated to the different network partitions. In this context, the idea is to consider some new...

Voluntary agreements with industry offer many examples of overcompliance with respect to environmental standards. Such phenomena seem to be irrational but appear less surprising considering firms' strategies are aimed to internalise environmental quality. We model the choice of the environmental...