The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011 led to some drastic reactions in Germany, in particular an immediate shut-down of older nuclear power plants. This event is therefore often seen as a turning point, or a major accelerator for the German Energiewende. We investigate the short term...

While humans often care about sunk investment, animals are not subject to this sort of sunk cost behavior or "Concorde fallacy." This paper investigates a simple two stage decision problem under uncertainty. At the second stage, subjects can commit the Concorde fallacy by sticking to the first...

Ramsey-Boiteux prices and monopoly prices are frequently regarded as being similar. This might suggest that, in particular in network industries with large fixed costs, sometimes monopoly pricing is close to the Ramsey-Boiteux second best and welfare superior to imperfectly regulated prices....

Competition between parallel infrastructures incorporates opposing welfare effects. The gain from reduced deadweight loss might be outweighed by the inefficient duplication of an existing infrastructure. Using data from broadband internet access for Western Europe 2000-2004, this paper...

Scarce interconnector capacities are a severe obstacle to transregional competition and a unified market for electricity in the European Union. However, physically the interconnectors are rarely used up to capacity. This is due to the fact that the current allocation schemes make only limited...