Face au ralentissement des ventes de véhicules, le « Pacte automobile » mobilise 9 milliards d’euros pour venir en aide aux constructeurs français. L’enjeu est triple : soutenir à court terme la demande et l’emploi, assurer l’avenir d’une industrie stratégique au regard des...

Effectiveness of real-time electricity prices depends upon consumers being willing to subscribe to them and being able to curb their consumption levels. The present paper addresses both issues by considering consumers differentiated by their saving costs in the stylized real-time pricing model...

Today in the British electricity industry, most electricity suppliers hedge a large proportion of their residential customer base requirements by owning their own plant. The non-storability of electricity and the corresponding need for an instantaneous matching of generation and consumption...

The paper focuses on the innovative French broadband Internet industry that is characterised by inertia phenomena in terms of technology choice. We argue that although inertia on the supply side helps to explain the faster diffusion of ADSL, a more complete picture can be obtained when we...

some factors grant innovators with a temporary monopoly. Patenting is the most cited factor in the economic literature. This survey concentrates on another factor that confers innovators with firstmover advantage over their competitors, namely consumer switching costs, whereby a consumer makes...

The existence of costs to consumers to switch between products is central to the process by which firms set prices. Their effect on the introduction and diffusion of innovative technologies is not by now well understood, however. This paper aims to study this effect based on evidence in the...

This paper investigates cross-market effects of policy instruments that were implemented in the table and quality wine market as one of the pillars of market intervention in Europe’s Common Market Organisation (CMO) for wine. We explore two hypotheses regarding the spill-over of distillation...

La libéralisation de l'activité d'un secteur économique à céder des actifs des entreprises historiques à de nouveaux entrants. Dans cet article, nous montrerons que lorsqu'il s'agit d'une activité à risque, le gain de la fragmentation de cette activité ne peut être évalué sans...

The opening up of the UK residential electricity sector in 1999 prompted several studies of the impact this had on both the level and structuring of retail charges, and on incumbent players’ market power. Drawing on observations of regional tariffs for the month of January 2004, this paper...

The residential UK electricity market was opened for the first time in 1999, introducing choice of supplier, and about 40% of households changed supplier in the first four years. After three years price caps were removed. We review this process and assess the competitiveness of the market by...