everyone may benefit from subsidising entry to risky occupations this paper shows that in the presence of costly state verification directly or indirectly subsidising entry to risky occupations may benefit everyone the result holds even in the presence of private insurance indeed it may be desirable to prohibit private insurance in favour of subsidies to hazardous activities these findings do not depend on the government having an advantage over the private sector in observing outcomes the explanation is that through its influence on equilibrium price feasible fiscal policy can shift the return distribution so as to create collective insurance more cheaply than is possible through private contracting with its requirement of costly auditing amongst applications is a case for a loss making state bank offering high interest rate loans

interactions of factors impacting implementation and sustainability of renewable energy sourced electricity abstract two renewable energy sourced electricity res e technologies are at the forefront of the current energy transition away from fossil fuels wind and solar photovoltaic however res e must overcome implementation and sustainability challenges from factors identified in economic policy societal technological and environmental dimensions res e diffusion is also a complex problem and this critical review suggests that outcomes depend on interdependencies between factors within a single or across multiple dimensions four categories of interactivity have been identified higher capital costs or market inequalities associated with the economic dimension of res e drive supportive policies or incentives in the policy dimension in the policy policy category interactions between res e demand or supply side incentives influence electricity pricing energy market mixes or greenhouse gases emissions the society technology category examines societal technological interactions at both micro and macro scales the environment technology category details interactions between res e and the environment the technology technology category examines synergies between res e when collocated with conventional electricity generation technologies this review identified several knowledge gaps first research on res e implementation lacks system level analyses on the impact of interactions on project outcomes a well developed line of research examines interactions between multiple simultaneous supportive policies on res e implementation in developed nations however a second gap exists on the understanding of these interactions in developing nations a third gap exists on evaluating the impact of technological lock in this includes the impact on res e implementation rates when the complex economic policy governance and societal factors implicated in lock in are removed

a new tailored scheme for the support of renewable energies in developing countries abstract historically the promotion of renewable energy technologies in isolated areas has involved international donors or governments subsidising the initial capital investment this paper proposes an alternative support mechanism for remote villages based on the generation of renewable electricity this communication presents an evaluation of the renewable energy premium tariff rpt scheme a locally adapted variation of the feed in tariff tailored for decentralised grids of developing countries the rpt scheme stimulates the deployment of renewable energy technologies by paying for renewable electricity generated a good quality performance is secured since the support is given based on the electricity produced by renewables not for the initial capital investment the mechanism has been designed to provide a cost effective scheme for the introduction of renewable energy technologies to remote villages to provide sustainable and affordable electricity to local users to make renewable energy projects attractive to policy makers and concurrently decrease financial risk to attract private sector investment

bounded growth of the bullwhip effect under a class of nonlinear ordering policies abstract this paper analyzes the bullwhip effect in multi echelon supply chains under a general class of nonlinear ordering policies a describing function approach from control theory is used to derive closed form formulas to predict amplification of order fluctuations along the supply chain it is proven that with consideration of nonlinearity in the ordering policy the magnitude of the bullwhip effect will eventually become bounded after growing through the first few stages of the supply chain it is also proven that the average customer demand as well as the demand fluctuation frequency would directly affect the bounded magnitude while the suppliers demand forecasting method has no effect at all for illustration analytical results for a class of order up to policies are derived and verified by numerical simulations the proposed modeling framework holds the promise to not only explain empirical observations but also serve as the basis for developing counteracting strategies against the bullwhip effect

avoiding the bullwhip effect using damped trend forecasting and the order up to replenishment policy we study the damped trend forecasting method and its bullwhip generating behaviour when used within the order up to out replenishment policy using z transform transfer functions we determine complete stability criteria for the damped trend forecasting method we show that this forecasting mechanism is stable for a much larger proportion of the parametrical space than is generally acknowledged in the literature we provide a new proof to the known fact that the naive exponential smoothing and holts method forecasting when used inside the out policy will always generate bullwhip for every possible demand process for any lead time further we demonstrate the damped trend out system behaves differently sometimes it will generate bullwhip and sometimes it will not bullwhip avoidance occurs when demand is dominated by low frequency harmonics in some instances in other instances bullwhip avoidance happens when demand is dominated by high frequency harmonics we derive sufficient conditions for when bullwhip will definitely be generated and necessary conditions for when bullwhip may be avoided we verify our analytical findings with a numerical investigation

the stabilizing effect of inventory in supply chains this paper presents a hierarchical model framework for the analysis of the stabilizing effect of inventories in multiechelon manufacturing distribution supply chains this framework is used to compare the variance of demand to the variance of replenishment orders at different echelons of the system e g retailer wholesaler empirical data and experience with management games suggest that in most industries inventory management policies can have a destabilizing effect by increasing the volatility of demand as it passes up through the chain the bullwhip effect our model helps to explain these observations and indicates mechanisms that can promote stabilization the analysis results also define sufficient conditions for the existence of stabilization and relate these conditions to the optimality of myopic control policies

optimal linear income taxation in models with occupational choice the purpose of this paper is to investigate the implication of occupational choice for linear income taxation occupational choice is restricted to entrepreneurship versus wage earning different settings are considered concerning the introduction of uncertainty and that of individuals heterogeneity in ability or risk aversion for each setting an optimal tax formula is derived and shown to be made up of various components pertaining to insurance redistribution and efficiency

the effect of information sharing on supply chain stability and the bullwhip effect this paper analyzes the bullwhip effect in multi stage supply chains operated with linear and time invariant inventory management policies and shared supply chain information such information includes past order sequences and inventory records at all supplier stages the paper characterizes the stream of orders placed at any stage of the chain when the customer demand process is known and ergodic and gives an exact formula for the variance of the orders placed the paper also derives robust analytical conditions based only on inventory management policies to predict the presence of the bullwhip effect and bound its magnitude these results hold independently of the customer demand the general framework proposed in this paper allows for any inventory replenishment policies any ways of sharing and utilizing information and any customer demand processes it is also shown as a special case that sharing customer demand information across the chain significantly reduces but does not completely eliminate the bullwhip effect

the second theorem of the second best abstract this paper interprets many results from the literature on incentive compatibility and cost benefit analysis as illustrations of a second theorem of the second best the theorem states that if there exists any restriction on transactions required for first best efficiency then there is no presumption that a social welfare maximum entails equal marginal social utilities of income across individuals one reason is that incentive constraints shift with redistributions of wealth so that redistributions have an instrumental role in relaxing constraints that make the economy second best two examples relate such wealth effects to countervailing incentives and hostage taking

sustainable energy planning leapfrogging the energy poverty gap in africa abstract the present paper introduces the results of a spatial economic analysis that identifies the least cost rural electrification options that can bring the persistent energy poverty to an end in sub saharan africa the rationale behind the analysis is that the applicable energy technologies have gone through fundamental changes and these have profound effects on the competitiveness of the various options the least cost distributed generation options are calculated for each geographical location for mini hydro off grid pv and diesel generators options and it is compared to the electricity grid extension the methodology presented in this manuscript organises the scarcely available energy related local and regional geo information into comprehensible maps the set of tools presented and the results based on those analyses can support decision and policy makers to plan for the least cost rural electrification options while also adapting to the most effective way to reduce energy poverty this can help in the national rural electrification plans by delineating which communities cannot be reached by existing grid without excessive extension costs and gives the alternative distributed generation option

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect commentary consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

adaptation of feed in tariff for remote mini grids tanzania as an illustrative case abstract following the successful feed in tariffs fits system worldwide few countries have implemented fits explicitly tailored for off grid or mini grid systems this study takes an integrated approach to examine the feasibility of an off grid feed in tariff off fit for existing and new remote mini grids in tanzania using a combination of geographical analysis technical economic and institutional assessments based on detailed modelling of two community off grid cases i pv diesel and ii mini hydro we identify least cost rural electrification options that make solar and mini hydro energy competitive with diesel generators and potential effect of the support scheme on rural electrification plans in the first case we illustrate where the off fit complements diesel generation of an existing mini grid pv diesel in the second case mini hydro we illustrate conditions where the off fit policy brings mini hydro generation to non electrified communities and sells renewable electricity directly to new customers currently tanzania has standardized power purchase spp rates which target generators connected to the national grid and distribution systems of mini grids or isolated grids we found for the off fit tariff the total amount needed to support the same number of customers by solar and hydro mini grids versus diesel would be of 31 5 million us or a premium of 0 11 us kwh to the present current spps tariff of 0 24 us kwh for pv we also found that a technology specific fit tariff would be most suitable to attract national and international investors by providing a rate of return that compensates the risk of the investment the overall support is comparable to the 36 million us that the government currently subsidizes and allocates to diesel mini grids in country and this shows the potential for a long term renewable energy strategy for mini grid areas

an arima supply chain model this paper presents a multistage supply chain model that is based on autoregressive integrated moving average arima time series models given an arima model of consumer demand and the lead times at each stage it is shown that the orders and inventories at each stage are also arima and closed form expressions for these models are given the paper also discusses the causes of the bullwhip effect a phenomenon in which variation in demand produces larger variations in upstream orders and inventory this discussion reveals how different modeling can lead to different insights because they make different assumptions about the cause of the bullwhip effect these observations are used to develop managerial insights about reducing the bullwhip effect

the bullwhip effect in supply chain networks this paper analyzes the propagation and amplification of order fluctuations i e the bullwhip effect in supply chain networks operated with linear and time invariant inventory management policies the supply chain network is allowed to include multiple customers e g markets any network structure with or without sharing information the paper characterizes the stream of orders placed by any supplier for any stationary customer demand processes and gives exact formulas for the variance of the orders placed and the amplification of order fluctuations the paper also derives robust analytical conditions based only on inventory management policies to predict the presence of the bullwhip effect for any network structure any inventory replenishment policies and arbitrary customer demand processes numerical examples show that the analytical results accurately quantify the bullwhip effect managerial insights are drawn from the analysis the methodology presented in this paper generalizes those in previous studies for serial supply chains

the impact of information enrichment on the bullwhip effect in supply chains a control engineering perspective this paper examines the beneficial impact of information sharing in multi echelon supply chains we compare a traditional supply chain in which only the first stage in the chain observes end consumer demand and upstream stages have to base their forecasts on incoming orders with an information enriched supply chain where customer demand data e g epos data is shared throughout the chain two types of replenishment rules are analysed order up to out policies and smoothing policies policies used to reduce or dampen variability in the demand for the class of out policies we will show that information sharing helps to reduce the bullwhipeffect variance amplification of ordering quantities in supply chains significantly especially at higher levels in the chain however the bullwhip problem is not completely eliminated and it still increases as one moves up the chain for the smoothing policies we show that information sharing is necessary to reduce order variance at higher levels of the chain the methodology is based on control systems engineering and allows us to gain valuable insights into the dynamic behaviour of supply chain replenishment rules we also introduce acontrolengineering based measure to quantify the variance amplification bullwhip or variance reduction

an energy pricing scheme for the diffusion of decentralized renewable technology investment in developing countries the purpose of this paper is to investigate price support for market penetration of renewable energy in developing nations through a decentralized supply process we integrate the new decentralized energy support renewable premium tariff to analyze impacts of tariff incentives on the diffusion of renewable technology in senegal based on photovoltaic and wind technologies and an assessment of renewable energy resources in senegal an optimization technique is combined with a cash flow analysis to investigate investment decisions in renewable energy sector our findings indicate that this support mechanism could strengthen the sustainable deployment of renewable energy in remote areas of senegal although different payoffs emerged profits associated with a renewable premium tariff are the highest among the set of existing payoffs moreover in analyzing impacts of price incentives on social welfare we show that price tariffing schemes must be strategically scrutinized in order to minimize welfare loss associated with price incentives finally we argue that a sustainable promotion of incentive mechanisms supporting deployment of renewable technology in developing nations should be carried out under reliable institutional structures the additional advantage of the proposed methodology is its ability to integrate different stakeholders producers investors and consumers in the planning process

on the stability of supply chains this paper examines the stability of decentralized multistage supply chains under arbitrary demand conditions it looks for intrinsic properties of the inventory replenishment policies that hold for all customer demand processes and for policies with desirable properties it is found that the overall conditions experienced by suppliers several stages removed from the final customer e g the variances of the orders they receive and the inventories they keep depend on the policy much more than on the demand process a policy specific but demand independent upper bound for the order variance amplification factor of any decentralized policy is shown to exist and its formula is presented the bound is always tight for the suppliers at the end of a long chain so that a policy exhibits the bullwhip effect if and only if its bound is greater than 1 a simple necessary condition for bullwhip avoidance is also identified in terms of a policy s gain gain is the marginal change in average inventory induced by a policy when there is a small but sustained change in the demand rate it is shown thatall policies with positive gain produce the bullwhip effect if they do not use future order commitments because manufacturers can reduce costs by operating with positive gain this explains the prevalence of the bullwhip effect a family of commitment based policies that can dynamically maintain any desired inventory level for any demand rate e g achieve positive gain without the bullwhip effect is also presented the family includes just in time strategies as a special case simulation results are used as an illustration

exploring renewable energy pricing with analytic network process comparing a developed and a developing economy abstract increasing use of renewable sources has a vital importance in mitigating increasing energy demand and global warming the limited reserves and negative environmental impacts associated with fossil fuel consumption make the renewable energy sources considerable alternatives in case environmental externalities are taken into consideration pricing models for renewable energy alternatives are commonly based on the same fundamentals as the fossil fuels but this approach neglects some of the characteristics that are unique to renewable energy alternatives in order to develop more accurate pricing models these unique variables which are mostly considered as market externalities need to be integrated in the current forms of pricing models the originality of this work is its ability to combine social technical environmental and economic aspects using analytic network process in order to provide a more holistic point of view on factors impacting renewable energy pricing through a comparison of two case studies united states u s and turkey are the two cases analyzed in this paper u s represents a developed economy whereas turkey represents a developing economy it is expected that the results of this work would be helpful for further research in understanding the dynamics behind pricing mechanism of the renewable sources in different environments for instance fundamental differences in relative importance of pricing factors between two case countries have been identified as different levels of enforcement through laws and regulations impact of geographic characteristics on site selection and job opportunities created through new investments

financing energy access and off grid electrification a review of status options and challenges abstract this paper provides a review of funding needs and financing mechanisms for energy access in general and off grid electrification in particular to find whether the funding for these activities has been adequate whether sufficient funding is likely to be available to meet the needs of universal energy access whether innovative approaches can be used in funding it finds that in all successful cases the state has played an important role in funding infrastructure investments but many developing countries have neglected the energy access issue for a long time international donor agencies have provided selective and limited support while the innovative mechanisms are also unfriendly towards small scale projects weak governance limited organisational capacity and unfavourable policy environment militate against large scale mobilisation of financial resources in the poorest countries of the world where energy access is a chronic problem the challenge of mobilising finance and ensuring its appropriate delivery and use remains a major issue and would require a co ordinated effort of all relevant stakeholders

an integrated framework for rural electrification adopting a user centric approach to business model development rural electrification re has gained prominence over the past two decades as an effective means for improving living conditions this growth has largely been driven by socio economic and political imperatives to improve rural livelihood and by technological innovation based on a content analysis of 232 scholarly articles the literature is categorized into four focal lenses technology institutional viability and user centric we find that the first two dominate the re debate the viability lens has been used less frequently whilst the user centric lens began to engage scholars as late as 2007 we provide an overview of the technological institutional and viability lenses and elaborate upon the user centric lens in greater detail for energy policy and practice we combine the four lenses to develop a business model framework that policy makers practitioners and investors could use to assess re projects or to design future rural electrification strategies

land taxes output taxes and sharecropping was henry george right economists have generally argued that if a land tax is administratively feasible then to increase efficiency it should be used to the exclusion of output taxes this article shows that underlying this policy prescription is the assumption that institutions for pooling and spreading production risks are perfect when account is taken of the imperfections in those institutions some use of output taxes will be pareto superior to a pure land tax regime and may induce higher output as well henry george was wrong these results generally apply even when the land tax is indexed to regional output and when land is farmed under sharecropping even in these cases a move from a pure land tax to a mix of land and low output taxes will reduce pre existing distortions in both consumption and production arising from the imperfection in risk markets

alternative framework for renewable energy planning in the philippines abstract like many countries striving to be responsible consumers of energy and conscious of the need to mitigate the impact of climate change the philippines has in both policy and practice shown a bias towards renewable energy re sources the country s proportion of re production in primary energy and distribution in electricity is significantly higher than those of many asian and european countries however the philippine national re program has adopted a strategy of aggressively amassing re capacity to the extent of tripling the capacity over the period 2011 to 2030 the preoccupation with more megawatts rather than the value of re beyond clean energy has erected a bias against off grid re applications off grid re applications can displace more expensive diesel generation and can enhance the livelihood opportunities for communities the insistence on focusing on megawatts is threatening to bloat the current feed in tariff structure by causing large grid connected applications to be seriously oversubscribed this paper reviews the current re status in the philippines and presents a simple alternative planning paradigm in which the ability of re technology to affect the livelihood of the residents and the effectiveness of its energy delivery are used to distinguish the utility of different re technologies in off grid and grid connected areas the authors also describe an actual kw scale off grid application that addresses both energy and economic poverty

can the production smoothing model of inventory behavior be saved the production smoothing model of inventory behavior has a long and venerable history and theoretical foundations that seem very strong yet certain overwhelming facts seem not only to defy explanation within the production smoothing framework but actually to argue that the basic idea of production smoothing is all wrong most prominent among these is the fact that the variance of detrended production exceeds the variance of detrended sales this paper first documents the stylized facts then it derives the production smoothing model rigorously and explains how the model can be amended to make it consistent with the facts finally it reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence and tries to draw some tentative conclusions

characterization of the bullwhip effect in linear time invariant supply chains some formulae and tests the authors analyze the bullwhip effect in multistage decentralized supply chains operated with linear and time invariant inventory management policies the focus is on robustness the supply chain is modeled as a single input single output control system driven by arbitrary customer demands the authors derive robust analytical conditions to predict the presence of the bullwhip effect and bound its magnitude based only on the way inventories are managed these results hold independently of the customer demand the authors also characterize the stream of orders placed at any stage of the chain when the customer demand process is known and ergodic and give an exact formula for the variance of the orders placed this formula generalizes existing results by broadening the class of inventory replenishment policies and customer demand processes to which it applies the authors also show that the bullwhip effect can be mitigated by introducing commitments for future orders into the ordering policies

measuring and avoiding the bullwhip effect a control theoretic approach an important contributory factor to the bullwhip effect i e the variance amplification of order quantities observed in supply chains is the replenishment rule used by supply chain members first the bullwhip effect induced by the use of different forecasting methods in order up to replenishment policies is analysed variance amplification is quantified and we prove that the bullwhip effect is guaranteed in the order up to model irrespective of the forecasting method used thus when production is inflexible and significant costs are incurred by frequently switching production quantities up and down order up to policies may no longer be desirable or even achievable in the second part of the paper a general decision rule is introduced that avoids variance amplification and succeeds in generating smooth ordering patterns even when demand has to be forecasted the methodology is based on control systems engineering and allows important insights to be gained about the dynamic behaviour of replenishment rules