This paper proposes a Transit Risk Index (TRI) designed to assess the riskiness of pipeline gas imports and to study the effect of introducing new gas routes. TRI controls for gas dependency, transit route diversification, political risks of transit, pipeline rupture probability, and the balance...

Current debate on the energy security in the EU often stresses the EU dependency on gas imports from Russia. However, Russia is no less dependent on the EU – more than half of its gas exports goes to Europe. The purpose of this paper is to characterize this mutual dependency through an...

We examine differences in behavior between subjects interacting with a member of either the same or different identity group in both a centipede game and a series of stag hunt games. We find evidence that subjects interacting with outgroup members are more likely to behave as though...

The creation of adequate investment incentives has been of great concern in the restructuring of the electricity sector. However, to achieve this regulators have applied different market designs across countries and regions. In this paper we employ laboratory methods to explore the relationship...

We conducted a field experiment to identify the causal effects of extrinsic incentive cues on the sorting and performance of nascent social entrepreneurs. The experiment, carried out with one of the United Kingdom's largest support agencies for social entrepreneurs, encouraged 431 nascent social...

We study the use of fi nancial contracts as bid-coordinating device in multi-unit uniform price auctions. Coordination is required whenever firms face a volunteer's dilemma in pricing strategies: one firm (the "volunteer") is needed to increase the market clearing price. Volunteering, however,...

Harassment bribes - payments people give in order not to be denied what they are legally entitled to – are common in for example India. Kaushik Basu recently made a ''radical'' proposal to reduce its occurrence: Legalize the act of giving the bribe and double the fine for accepting the bribe!...

Based on my recent work with several co-authors this paper explores the relationship between discretion, reputation, competition and entry in procurement markets. I focus especially on public procurement, which is highly regulated for accountability and trade reasons. In Europe regulation...

Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when services are procured rather than produced in-house. However, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009,...

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment exploring the relationship between reputation and entry in procurement. There is widespread concern among regulators that favoring suppliers with good past performance, a standard practice in private procurement, may hinder entry by new...