This article deals with the optimal differentiation of agri-environmental contracts based on a self-selection mechanism. The paper demonstrates that both economic efficiency and effectiveness of public expenditures can be increased, if a menu of combinations of farming practices and payments are...

We explore in this paper the consequences of status seeking preferences among agentscontracting with a private principal in the context of production. We examine in particular the case of envy and we show that in general envy entails augmented distortions due to asymmetric information in optimal...

Pension reform is one of the biggest challenges facing national governments. How toreform the old pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems is still under hot debate; one of themost influential funded pension schemes is designed by the World Bank. In thesecond chapter of this paper, we first review the...

This paper studies the impact of variations of a pay-as-you-go pension system on welfare in a stochastic overlapping generations model where compulsory public retirement savings coexist with private savings in assets and bonds. It is shown that, for a stationary population, any reduction of...

Well-defined interfaces and standardization allow for the composition of single Web services into value-added complex services. Such complex Web Services are increasingly traded via agile marketplaces, facilitating flexible recombination of service modules to meet heterogeneous customer demands....

The fundamental paradigm shift from traditional value chains to agile service value networks (SVN) implies new economic and organizational challenges. This work provides an auction-based coordination mechanism that enables the allocation and pricing of service compositions in SVNs. The mechanism...

Game theoretic modeling involves making assumptions on agents' infinite hierarchies of beliefs. These assumptions are understood to be only approximately satisfied in the actual situation. Thus, the significance of game theoretic predictions depend on robustness properties of the solution...

Paper removed by author 02/04/09.

Many conservation programs offer financialcompensation to farmers in exchange for socially desiredservices, such as soil conservation or biodiversity protection.Realization of the conservation objective at minimum costrequires payments to just cover the extra costs incurred byeach individual...

"In 1968, Hardin argued that all commonly-owned resources would tragically be depleted unless private ownership was granted. There are many case studies which prove Hardin wrong. Common-pool resources have been managed with success. However, this success does not imply (as some believe) that...