We study the performance of jointly owned production units where upstream firms sell inputs to a downstream final market producer. It is found that, compared to integrated firms, co-ownership leads to overinvoicing of input prices (transfer prices), resulting in lower aggregate profits. Tax and...

Motivated by repeated play of non-cooperative games, we study equation solving undertaken in parallel by several non-communicating agents, each dealing with his own block of variables. The process is akin to Newton's method in using derivative information. It does, however, proceed without...

This paper attempts to delineate the mechanisms that link social capital and economic development. I show that social capital can produce two kinds of trust, both of which can reduce transaction costs. It is important to keep these two sources of trust apart, since development policies utilizing...

Prime objects of this note are (I) excess demand generated by price-taking economic agents, and (II) an alternative version of tatonnement. We relate laws of demand, axioms of revealed preferences, and other notions of generalized monotonicity to evolutionary stable prices. Focus is on local...

A standard approach to duality in stochastic optimization problems with constraints in L(infinite) relies upon the Yosida-Hewitt theorem. We develop an alternative technique which employs only "elementary" means. The technique is based on an e-regularization of the original problem and on...

This paper uses data from a natural experiment to investigate the potential incentive effect of a fixed unemployment insurance period. We compare two large groups of Norwegian unemployed persons who registered as unemployed in 1990 and 1991. The last group was affected by a rule change that in...

In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of labour market training programmes in raising participants employment rates. Detailed pre-training and post-training information on background variables, earnings and employment are used to estimate the training effect.

We formulate a simple static equilibrium model for the electricity market taking account of both Green certificated and CO2-emission permits. The objective is to investigate the relationship between these markets under the existence of upper and lower price-bounds on the Green certificates, both...

In this paper, we study the effects of introducing endogenous costs in a Tullock model of rent-seeking. We show that unions can be efficiency improving, and that the firms' level of effort depends more critically upon the number of firms participating in the contests when unions are present. We...

The main objects below are transferable-utility games in which each agent faces an optimization problem, briefly called production planning, constrained by his resource endowment. Coalitions can pool members's resources. Such production games are here extended to accomodate uncertainty about...