In this paper we recognize that reforms of the welfare state can be necessary from an economic point of view. We stress, however, that these reforms also have important social and political dimensions. The social dimensions are conceptualised by using Hofstede''s cultural characteristics. The...

Manchmal sind Privatisierungen im herkömmlichen Sinne nicht das effektivste Verfahren, um mit einen Erbe an Staatsunternehmungen zu verfahren, die den neuen wirtschaftlichen Bedingungen nicht mehr entsprechen. Dieser Beitrag greift auf einen ausgereiften Gesetzentwurf zurück, um eine...

In this paper we show that the claim that the price in a Stackelberg model is lower than the price in a Cournot model, does not necessarily hold in an entry-deterrence framework. Using a signaling model of entry deterrence, we show that when post-entry competition is Stackelberg instead of...

The principle of subsidiarity has become more widely known with its prominent adoption in the Maastricht Treaty. The principle is, however, deeply embedded in the history of political economy, notably in the continental European tradition. In this tradition, it has the status of a principle in...

We consider the problem of reallocating the total initial endowments of an infinitely divisible commodity among agents with single-peaked preferences. With the uniform reallocation rule we propose a solution which satisfies many appealing properties, describing the effect of population and...

By virtue of the Kemeny distance strategy-proofness of preference rules is defined. It is shown that a preference rule, which assigns a complete relation to every profile of complete relations is non-imposed and strategy-proof if and only if it is pairwise voting in committees. So,...

This paper examines the consumer requirements for payment systems on the Internet. According to previous literature, the eight important features of payment systems from a consumer’s point of view are: security, reliability, privacy, acceptability, person-to-person (P2P), flexibility, price,...

In this paper, the experience of OECD countries with public management reform, as has been attempted since the nineteen seventies until now, is discussed. In particular we focus on the lessons which can be drawn from public management reform attempts in English speaking countries on the one hand...

This study provides new evidence on the emergence of a single Eurozone retail banking market. Applying cointegration methodology, the empirical results indicate only limited evidence for integration before January 1, 1999. The introduction of the Euro manifests itself in structural breaks after...

Gibbard''s (1973) and Satterthwaite''s (1975) result implies that anonymous surjective social choice functions on more than two alternatives are manipulable. Placing some mild constraints on the number of agents compared to the number of alternatives, we show what the minimal number of...