In China and some other developing countries' public health sectors, many patients give their doctors a payment outside the official channel before a major treatment. This secret payment has been documented as informal payment in the literature. We argue that the fundamental cause for informal...

An extensive empirical literature indicates that returns from innovation are appropriated primarily via mechanisms other than formal intellectual property rights -- and that `imitation' is itself a costly activity. However most theory assumes the pure nonrivalry of `ideas' with its implication...

This chapter analyzes the possibility of manipulation in futures markets, concentrating on the effects that manipulation may have on their informational efficiency . We use the concept of manipulation as it arises in the study of noncooperative games with imperfect information . The problem can...

Today the importance of networks between actors and institutions is growing. There are several benefits that these networks can create, from the greater dissemination of information through sharing of resources to access to specialized assets. Networks facilitate the sharing of best-practice and...

In a world where the private protection of property is costly, government redistribution can lead to an increase in aggregate output. This result is not new. The novelty of this paper lies in specifying the conditions under which this efficiency-enhancing redistribution improves everyone’s...

One of the major objectives of the Common Agricultural Policy is the sustainable development of the agricultural sector and of the rural area. Romania, as a country recent integrated in the European Union, has to pass an adapting process to the CAP, in order to achieve sustainable farming...

This paper aims to identify the barriers to innovation that influence the innovation capability of Portuguese industrial firms. The literature review about innovation makes use of two references approaches: (i) the systemic; and (ii) the networks and inter-organizational relationships. The...

In this paper we examine pricing imperfections in software companies by analyzing the case of Microsoft, and we uncover the presence of pervasive dead-weight losses derived from the inability of the producer to achieve first degree price discrimination. Because the nature of software is such...

The main objective of the financial appraisal of an innovation project is to measure the rentability of those projects. The financial appraisal of an innovation project is similary to investment projects at short level. But on the other side, it has certain features due to its main...

Market inefficiency has influence on resource allocation, as price signals tend systematically understate or overstate the effects of information transmitted to the trading parties in the market. In this paper a number of statistical tests employed to assess the weak-form efficiency of Khartoum...