Die kommunale Wirtschaftsförderung verfolgt das Ziel, die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung innerhalb einer Kommune zu verbessern bzw. zu verstetigen. Mithilfe zweier grundlegender Strategien, der Clusterbildung und des Mixed-Portfolio-Ansatzes, kann dieses Ziel unter Beeinflussung verschiedener...

Öffentliche Studienfinanzierung kann entweder nach dem Fürsorge- oder dem Versorgungsprinzip gestaltet werden. In einem empirischen Vergleich werden zwei Gruppen von europäischen Ländern gegenübergestellt, die jeweils einem dieser Prinzipien folgen. Es zeigt sich, dass Länder, die das...

The integration of the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe into the European Union creates a dilemma for the EU's regional policy. The EU's expenditure on regional policy (its 'active' regional policy) has been guided by political reactions to deepening or enlarging the EU,...

We consider a high-quality dominant firm facing a low-quality competitive fringe. We show that the effect of an increase in the dominant firm's product quality on its equilibrium quantity depends on its marginal cost relative to that of the fringe firms. The dominant firm's output increases in...

We study an auction with two distinct type of potential bidders: consumers who wish to purchase the item for their own consumption and middlemen who wish to purchase the item for the purpose of reselling it to the final consumers. Typically, the behavior of the former is studied under the...

It is occasionally observed that auctions are designed to exclude the participation of final consumers. Resellers are the only participants in these auctions. This behavior is sometimes rationalized on the basis of transaction costs: it is cheaper to deal with a small group of individuals on a...

Members of a bidding ring often use a private sale among themselves, known as the knockout, to decide who will buy the object that the ring has secured. The difference between the price realized in this private sale and the price paid by the ring in the public auction is divided, on the basis of...

The Gini coefficient is a downwardly biased measure of inequality in small populations when income is generated by one of three common distributions. The paper discusses the sources of bias and argues that this property is far more general. This has implications for (i) the comparison of...