The task of substituting the entire global fossil-fueled energy system by renewables is increasingly discussed in the energy literature, but in the social sciences academy it is widely viewed as impossibly large within any meaningful timeframe. In this article we argue that such pessimism is...

The energy delivery of a solar-energy system is generally associated with the sun's available irradiance and spectral content, as well as a variety of environmental and climatic factors and inherent system and component performances. However, other external factors relating to geographical...

Conventional Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies have been mainly developed during the eighties. They can be considered as similar to conventional thermal power processes in which the boiler has been replaced, at least partially, by a concentrated solar field producing the heat. After...

We have analyzed the application of decision analysis and risk management tools to solve practical problems associated with Climate Change and Risk Detection in the financial services industry. Geoengineering, which is described as an intentional modification of earth’s environment to mitigate...

Standard economic intuition of revealed preference implies that when two parties freely enter into a contract then neither should be worse off. In this study, we develop a simple model showing that introducing the opportunity to contract can lower welfare for some, and perhaps all, contracting...

This article studies the static pricing problem of a network service provider who has a fixed capacity and faces different types of customers (classes). Each type of customers can have its own capacity constraint but it is assumed that all classes have the same resource requirement. The provider...

Drei große Reformenpakete und eine Reihe kleinerer Begleitmaßnahmen prägen das renten¬politische Erbe der rot-grünen Bundesregierung. Einerseits greifen sie Trends in der Reformpolitik seit Beginn der 90er Jahre auf. So verstärkt die Rentenstrukturreform 2001 beispielsweise die...