There has recently been considerable discussion about the ability of inflation to facilitate the adjustment of prices and wages and thus enhance economic performance. The discussion centres on whether wages are downwardly rigid. Wages are said to be downwardly rigid if it is difficult for the...

This paper is part of a wider research programme using a dynamic-programming approach to modelling the choices about the amount of risk to take by batting and bowling teams in One Day International cricket. An important confounding variable in this analysis is the ground conditions (size of...

In a standard English auction in which bidders’ valuations are independently drawn from a common distribution, a standard regularity condition is that the survivor function of the distribution be log concave. In an auction where the seller sets a fixed price, the equivalent condition requires...

This paper is the second in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. In this paper, we discuss the Report’s measures of the ability and incentives of generators to exercise unilateral market power. We show that the construction...

This paper is the first in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. The Wolak report concluded that there had been a cumulative total of $4.3b (NZD) of overcharging in the New Zealand wholesale market over a period of seven years....

This paper derives a general sufficient condition for existence and uniqueness in continuous games using a variant of the contraction mapping theorem applied to mapping from a subset of the real line on to itself. We first prove this contraction mapping variant, and then show how the existence...

This paper is the second in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. In this paper, we discuss the Report's measures of the ability and incentives of generators to exercise unilateral market power. We show that the construction...

This paper is the first in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. The Wolak report concluded that there had been a cumulative total of NZ$4.3 billion of overcharging in the New Zealand wholesale market over a period of seven...