This paper discusses the role of secret versus public reserve prices when bidders’ valuations depend positively on the seller’s private signal. A public reserve price is announced before the auction starts, and a secret reserve price is disclosed after the highest bid has been reached. The...

This paper analyses issue linkage as a way to increase co-operation on issues where incentives to free-ride are strong. The goal is to determine under what conditions players prefer to link negotiations on two different issues rather than to negotiate on the two issues separately. Suppose that...

Since the framework convention of Rio, actual environmental negotiations on climate change aim at inducing all world countries to sign global environmental agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the past unsuccessful attempts, even current negotiations seem to pursue the same...

In this paper an n-player non-co-operative game is used to model countries' decision of whether or not to sign an international agreement on climate change control. The stable coalition structure of the game is defined and then computed for a climate game in which the role of carbon leakage is...

In this paper, the reaction of firms to the introduction of environmental charges in a given industry is analysed. Firms may decide either to relocate their plants abroad or to adopt a new environmental-friendly technology. The latter can be either developed by investing in R&D or obtained by...

In this paper a simple model is used to analyse the strategic behaviour of countries that bargain over CO2 emission reductions. Five main world regions are considered and their incentives to sign an international agreement on climate change control are analysed. A non-cooperative approach to...

This paper surveys the recent literature devoted to the analysis of the interactions between the adoption of voluntary or negotiated agreements as a tool of environmental policy and market structure. The goal of this survey is twofold. On the one hand, we would like to identify the market...

This paper elaborates on the recent race to sequence the human genome. Starting from the debate on public vs. private research arising from the genome case, the paper shows that in some fundamental research areas, where knowledge externalities play an important role, market and non-market...

This paper discusses the issue of competitiveness and environmental regulation in a dynamic framework. It presents an example and a general model. It is shown that the dynamic framework cannot lend general support to the hypothesis that strict environmental policies result in an increase in...

This paper discusses a simultaneous market entry game between two firms with different fixed costs. This case is a typical application of mixed strategy equilibria. Conventional wisdom would suggest that the low-cost firm is more likely to enter the market. This presumption is wrong. Instead,...