Corruption all over the world is an ancient, but it seems very topical too, concern in politics and in the media. This paper investigates spatial and dynamic aspects of corruption using cellular automata. Although cellular automata are very simple, deterministic machines and thus crude...

This paper compares the philosopher Sir Karl Raimund Popper with the Nobel prize winner of economics, James M. Buchanan. Popper is known for his ‘demarcation criterion’ an attempt to separate science from metaphysics. Buchanan is one of the founding fathers of modern political...

Countries often have private information about their willingness to pay for protecting the climate system and their cost of emission reductions. We use a principal-agent model to re-examine the economic case for unilateral action by individual countries, in our case of the principal. We ?nd that...

This paper analyzes the optimal strategy of a monopoly facing stochastic and dynamic demand and choosing a Cournot-type strategy, more precisely, adjusting its output. This investigation is motivated by the decisions of OPEC to adjust its output and by the again high and volatile oil prices. The...

This paper investigates the intertemporal monopolistic supply of a clean technology and addresses the following questions: How does the lack of governments to commit restrict the incentives and thereby the supply of clean technologies? Are either emission taxes or emission permits better suited...

We consider contracting of a principal with an agent if multilateral externalities are present. The motivating example is that of an interna- tional climate agreement given private information about the willingness- to-pay (WTP) for emissions abatement. Due to multilateral externalities the...

The pricing of district heat is an efficient marketing instrument, in addition to a coercive measure. We derive an efficient contract, i.e., a mix of charges (for access, fixed charges and for heat) such that all costs are covered and that the consumer's expenses are minimal. Price...

We investigate how a redistribution of oil reserves among a (probably reduced) set of producers affects OPEC's oil extraction policies and thus international crude oil-prices. The empirical investigation shows that this impact is fairly small, as long as OPEC members do not cooperate. Only...

We consider contracting of a principal with an agent if multilateral externalities are present. The motivating example is that of an international climate agreement given private information about the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for emissions abatement. Due to multilateral externalities the...