walrasian equilibrium with gross substitutes in this paper we study the problem of efficient production and allocation of indivisible objects among a set of consumers we assume that the agents preferences depend on the bundle of objects and the quantity of money they consume furthermore we assume that preferences are quasilinear in money and that agents have a large endowment of money with indivisibilities it is well known that many familiar properties of the utility functions fail to ensure existence in their striking analysis of the matching problem kelso and crawford 5 introduce the gross substitutes gs condition which ensures the non emptiness of the core we propose two new conditions and show that with quasilinearity they are equivalent article id jeth 1999 2531 available online at http www idealibrary com on

biofuels in developing countries are comparative advantages enough this paper investigates the role of comparative advantage on biofuel policy adoption results show that different countries have different drivers to create biofuel policies gdp proves to be more significant for oecd countries while arable land and feedstock prices are more significant for non oecd countries land allocation may also be of importance we speculate that a naturally endowed comparative advantage may not necessarily equate to a successful biofuel industry

social and techno economical analysis of biodiesel production in peru peru has introduced a law to promote the use of biofuels with the objective to increase employment strengthening agriculture development providing an economic alternative to illegal drug production in this work the costs of biodiesel production from oil palm and jatropha were analyzed under different scenarios they include the participation of associations of smallholders and commercial producers as raw material provides in biodiesel business in peru the scenarios considered have a strong social dimension in which they explicitly consider how productions 39 costs change when smallholders supply a proportion of the feedstock to the industry production cost profiles were generated using the chemical process simulation and economical evaluation software packages provided by aspen technology total production cost found for oil palm biodiesel production ranged between 0 23 and 0 31 usd l and jatropha biodiesel production costs were between 0 84 and 0 87 usd l these production costs were analyzed and compared to biodiesel ex factory prices and diesel fuel production cost factors the results suggest that including smallholders in the supply chain can be under some conditions competitive with liquid biofuel production systems that are purely large scale c 2012 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

broadening the market design approach to school choice school choice refers to policies that allow parents preferences to be an input to the decision of which school a student will attend a rich body of research has developed over the past 10 15 years to study mechanisms that implement school choice this literature has mostly taken the inputs of school choice preferences priorities and capacities as exogenous more recently researchers have sought to embed the school choice problem into its wider context thereby broadening the scope of market design questions and enriching the analysis this article discusses current school choice policy issues in light of this recent literature and outlines remaining open questions

competition based environmental policy an analysis of farmland preservation in maryland policy makers have turned to competition based voluntary enrollment programs as a cost effective way to achieve preferred land uses this paper studies bidder behavior in an innovative auction based program in which farmers compete to sell and retire the right to develop their land we derive a reduced form bidding model that includes private and common values this model allows us to estimate the role of bidder competition winner s curse correction and the underlying distribution of private values we estimate that the auction enrolled as many as 3 000 acres 12 more than a take it or leave it offer would have enrolled for the same budgetary cost

an empirical study of an auction with asymmetric information this paper examines federal auctions for drain age leases on the outer continental shelf from 1959 to 1969 these are leases that are adjacent to tracts on which a deposit has been discovered the authors find that the data strongly support the hypotheses that neighbor firms are better informed about the value of a lease than nonneighbor firms that neighbor firms coordinate their bidding decisions and that both types of firms bid strategically in accordance with the bayesian nash equilibrium model for first price sealed bid auctions with asymmetric information

a binary conflict ascending price bicap mechanism for the decentralized allocation of the right to use railroad tracks the questions posed for study are motivated by controversies over how sweden might change from a centralized system of railroad management to a decentralized system the central rail administration banverket will retain ownership and maintenance responsibility of the tracks but will sell access to the tracks to private firms the questions are about the mechanism that might accomplish this task parties to the controversy have claimed that the technical aspects of networks will as a matter of principle preclude the operation of any decentralized method this paper explores the properties of a mechanism developed as a challenge to that claim the mechanism is examined in the context of a testbed experimental environment that contains many potential problem causing elements in the tests performed the mechanism operated to efficiently allocate access to the network and it did so for behavioral reasons that are understandable in terms of theory the paper closes with suggestions for further study of environments that might present additional challenges to a mechanism

two further impossibility results on responsive affirmative action in school choice abstract this paper investigates the responsiveness of priority based affirmative action in school choice we consider two efficiency improved mechanisms kesten s eadam efficiency adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism and da ttc mechanism running deferred acceptance and then running top trading cycles algorithm we show that neither eadam nor da ttc is minimally responsive to the priority based affirmative action policy that is under eadam or da ttc there are market situations in which a stronger affirmative action policy may result in a pareto inferior assignment for the minority students

biofuels and food security micro evidence from ethiopia abstract there is considerable controversy about the impact of biofuels on food security in developing countries a major concern is that biofuels reduce food security by increasing food prices in this paper we use survey evidence to assess the impact of castor production on poor and food insecure rural households in ethiopia about 1 3 of poor farmers have allocated on average 15 of their land to the production of castor beans under contract in biofuel supply chains castor production significantly improves their food security they have fewer months without food and the amount of food they consume increases castor cultivation is beneficial for participating households food security in several ways by generating cash income from castor contracts they can store food for the lean season castor beans preserve well on the field which allows sales when farmers are in need of cash or food spillover effects of castor contracts increases the productivity of food crops increased food crop productivity offsets the amount of land used for castor so that the total local food supply is not affected

a survey of recent empirical work concerning auctions in this paper the authors survey some recent empirical work concerning auctions first outlining two complementary approaches to the empirical analysis of auctions and then discussing several recent developments in the econometric analysis of field data concerning auctions

fair implementation of diversity in school choice many school districts have objectives regarding how students of different races ethnicity or religious backgrounds should be distributed across schools a growing literature in mechanism design is introducing school choice mechanisms that attempt to satisfy those requirements we show that mechanisms based on the student proposing deferred acceptance may fail to satisfy those objectives but that by using instead the school proposing deferred acceptance together with a choice function used by the schools which incorporates a preference for satisfying them can optimally approximate the diversity objectives while still satisfying an appropriate fairness criterion we provide analytical results which show that the proposed mechanism has a general ability to satisfy those objectives as opposed to some currently proposed mechanisms which may yield segregated assignments

reserves regret and rejoicing in open english auctions auction sellers usually must set a reserve which is the lowest auction price that they will accept i propose that anticipated regret and rejoicing affect reserves regret occurs when the highest bid exceeds the seller s value for the property but is still below the reserve rejoicing occurs when the reserve forces the winning bidder to pay a higher price the impact of regret and rejoicing can be observed by examining sellers learning over sequential auctions particularly when they use a frequency heuristic results from an auction experiment with simulated bidders support the impact of anticipated regret and rejoicing on reserves

a review of social sustainability considerations among eu approved voluntary schemes for biofuels with implications for rural livelihoods the rapid expansion of biofuel production and consumption has raised concerns over the social and environmental sustainability of biofuel feedstock production processing and trade the european union eu has thus balanced its commitment to biofuels as one option for meeting its renewable energy targets with sustainability criteria for economic operators supplying biofuels to member states seven voluntary eu sustainability schemes were approved in july 2011 as a means to verify compliance while mandated sustainability criteria have a strong environmental focus a number of these voluntary schemes have social sustainability as a significant component of the requirements put forward for achieving certification as several of these voluntary schemes are incipient thereby limiting evidence on their effectiveness in practice this analysis is based on a comparative analysis of the substantive content or scope of these schemes and the likely procedural effectiveness of the same findings show that while some schemes have considerable coverage of social sustainability concerns poor coverage of some critical issues the presence of schemes lacking any social sustainability requirements and gaps in procedural rules are likely to undermine the likelihood that social sustainability is achieved through these schemes or the eu sustainability policies lending credibility to them

field experiments on the effects of reserve prices in auctions more magic on the internet i present experimental evidence on the effects of minimum bids in first price sealed bid auctions the auction experiments manipulated the minimum bids in a preexisting market on the internet for collectible trading cards from the game magic the gathering i examine a number of outcomes including the number of participating bidders the probability of sale the levels of individual bids and the auctioneer s revenues the benchmark theoretical model is one with symmetric risk neutral bidders with independent private values the results verify a number of the predictions concerning equilibrium bidding many bidders behave strategically anticipating the effects of the reserve price on others bids

affirmative actions the boston mechanism case we consider three popular affirmative action policies in school choice quota based priority based and reserve based affirmative actions the boston mechanism bm is responsive to the latter two policies in that a stronger priority based or reserve based affirmative action makes some minority student better off however a stronger quota based affirmative action may yield a pareto inferior outcome for the minority under the bm these positive results disappear once we look for a stronger welfare consequence on the minority or focus on bm equilibrium outcomes

biofuel development in ghana policies of expansion and drivers of failure in the jatropha sector abstract biofuel development was mainly promoted in several parts of africa as an energy security or rural development strategy jatropha was the biofuel feedstock that received the most interest across africa from investors however jatropha expansion gave rise to a number of contested issues which produced conflicts winners and losers access to land was at the heart of several of these conflicts though some success stories of individual jatropha projects have been documented the overwhelming majority of these projects in africa have either collapsed or faced significant difficulties understanding the reasons behind the failure of the jatropha sector is an important gap in the academic literature while the lessons learnt from failed projects could inform future policies and practices this literature review synthesizes the key drivers of failure of the jatropha sector in ghana as identified in the literature and complemented through site visits and expert interviews it identifies a number of reasons behind the failure of individual jatropha projects such as poor business planning institutional barriers limited community participation unfair compensation practices obstacles posed by civil society and unconstructive involvement of chiefs the findings indicate the systemic nature of these problems as they often worked synergistically to catalyse the collapse of many jatropha projects in ghana re vitalising the biofuel and especially the jatropha industry is virtually impossible given the current challenges this would require a renewed political interest in ghana particularly to deal with the deficits of the land administration institutions

a comparison of naive and experienced bidders in common value offer auctions a laboratory analysis laboratory economics experiments typically use financially motivated students as subjects an ongoing issue is whether this is an appropriate subject pool since the students are typically inexperienced in the types of decision making required of them in the lab this paper addresses this issue in the context of common value offer auctions as we compare the behaviour of experienced business executives in the construction contract industry experts with that of naive student subjects results of previous research of this sort have been equivocal in some cases experts make the same errors as novices in other cases they do not hogarth and reder i987 a series of sealed bid common value offer auctions in which bidders compete for the right to supply an item of unknown cost were conducted inherent to common value auctions cvas is an adverse selection problem which may result in below normal or negative profits the winner s curse experimental studies have documented the presence of the winner s curse with financially motivated student subjects in high price demand side auctions kagel et al i986 kagel and levin i986 the experiments reported here generalise these earlier studies from bid to offer auctions also in employing offer auctions we establish a setting with which our experts are familiar thus allowing their experience the best chance to manifest itself

biofuels in sub sahara africa drivers impacts and priority policy areas there has been a growing interest in jatropha and sugarcane based biofuels across sub sahara africa biofuel expansion in the region reflects policy concerns related to energy security poverty alleviation and economic development however biofuels have also been linked to numerous environmental and socioeconomic impacts such as ghg emissions water availability pollution deforestation biodiversity loss poverty alleviation energy security loss of access to land and food security to name just a few yet there is a an insufficient understanding of these impacts and their synergies in sub sahara africa and b a lack of policies that could regulate the biofuel sector and ensure its viability while at the same time preventing its negative impact the aim of this literature review is to synthesize the current knowledge about biofuel impacts in africa and to identify priority policy areas that should be targeted for enhancing biofuel sustainability in the continent the findings of this review indicate that biofuel impacts can be positive or negative depending on several factors such as the feedstock the environmental socio economic context of biofuel production and the policy instruments in place during biofuel production use and trade in most cases there are significant trade offs but at least part of the negative impacts can be mitigated through careful planning the incomplete and piecemeal understanding of these trade offs combined with agronomic institutional and market failures are currently the most important barriers for the viability and sustainability of biofuel investments in the continent

testing for common costs in the city of helsinki bus transit auctions abstract i study the effects of competition in the city of helsinki bus transit market by conducting two tests for common costs in these first price sealed bid procurement auctions i introduce bidder asymmetry and pooling to the tests i also discuss the need for robustness checks for some arbitrary choices in these tests the information environment seems to be that of common costs the bus companies that have garages close to the contracted routes are influenced more by the common elements than those whose garages are further away more competition does not necessarily lower procurement costs and the city should not necessarily implement costly policies to induce more competition a recent merger of two public companies cannot be criticized from a competition perspective

group incentive compatibility for matching with contracts abstract hatfield and milgrom hatfield john william milgrom paul r 2005 matching with contracts amer econ rev 95 913 935 present a unified model of matching with contracts which includes the standard two sided matching and some package auction models as special cases they show that the doctor optimal stable mechanism is strategy proof for doctors if hospitals preferences satisfy substitutes and the law of aggregate demand we show that the doctor optimal stable mechanism is group strategy proof for doctors under these same conditions that is no group of doctors can make each of its members strictly better off by jointly misreporting their preferences we derive as a corollary of this result that no individually rational allocation is preferred by all the doctors to the doctor optimal stable allocation

bidding behavior in sequential cattle auctions the objectives of this study are to investigate the institutional speciflcs of sequential cattle auctions and their role as determinants of prices institutional speciflcs are the order of sale according to quality a secret reserve price bidders multi unit demand and difierent types of bidders prices decline and bidders with a higher demand pay on average lower prices the estimation results show that declining prices are caused by the order of sale according to quality and the secret reserve price the results further show that bidders take the strategic efiect of sequential auctions and multi unit demand into account

affirmative action through minority reserves an experimental study on school choice abstract minority reserves are an affirmative action policy proposed by hafalir et al 2013 in the context of school choice in a laboratory experiment we find that adding minority reserves to the gs and ttc mechanisms has positive effects on stability but is quite disappointing in terms of efficiency also gs induces higher rates of truth telling by minority students and thus outclasses ttc

reserve design unintended consequences and the demise of boston s walk zones we show that in the presence of admissions reserves the effect of the precedence order i e the order in which different types of seats are filled is comparable to the effect of adjusting reser

pennies from ebay the determinants of price in online auctions this paper presents an exploratory analysis of the determinants of prices in online auctions for collectible united states one cent coins at the ebay web site starting with an initial data set of 20 000 auctions we perform regression analysis on a restricted sample of 461 coins for which we obtained estimates of book value we have three major findings first a seller s feedback ratings reported by other ebay users have a measurable effect on her auction prices negative feedback ratings have a much greater effect than positive feedback ratings do second minimum bids and reserve prices have positive effects on the final auction price in particular minimum bids appear only to have a significant effect when they are binding on a single bidder as predicted by theory third when a seller chooses to have her auction last for a longer period of days this significantly increases the auction price on average

addressing the renewable energy financing gap in africa to promote universal energy access integrated renewable energy financing in malawi abstract the sustainable energy for all initiative is a global initiative launched by the united nations secretary general in 2012 with a goal of providing universal access to modern energy services by 2030 to achieve this goal substantial financial and technological investments will be required at a rate far exceeding historical levels sub saharan africa has a 30 5 electrification rate and policy reform issues to improve electrification have been poorly implemented thereby sprinkling doubt as to whether the region would be able to achieve 100 access to electricity for all by the year 2030 sub saharan africa faces a tough challenge in order to achieve universal access to modern energy services since the region fails to attract energy sector investments there is also a general perception that the region contributes very little to global greenhouse gas emissions hence offers few opportunities to reduce these emissions consequently missing out on attracting climate finance projects a guarantee of power purchase has been shown to attract energy sector investments however guarantees of power purchases such as feed in tariffs are experiencing slow market growth in developing countries because of a range of technical regulatory and financial barriers using malawi as a case study of a developing country this review provides a perspective from a sub saharan africa least developed country as to the various electrification renewable energy deployment and climate change management challenges that still require urgent attention this study shows that despite the perceived regulatory and financial challenges malawi can integrate and use a combination of adapted price guarantee schemes cross subsidies and environmental taxes in order to support initiatives aimed at supporting the country s development of renewable energy sources and hence indirectly support the sustainable energy for all initiative

an empirical model of firm entry with endogenous product type choices i describe a model of entry with endogenous product type choices these choices are formalized as the outcomes of a game of incomplete information in which rivals differentiated products have nonuniform competitive effects on profits i estimate the model for location choices in the video retail industry using a nested fixed point algorithm solution the results imply significant returns to product differentiation simulations illustrate the tradeoff between demand and intensified competition and the extent to which markets with more scope for differentiation support greater entry

designing random allocation mechanisms theory and applications randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation we generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi unit allocations and various real world constraints such as group specific quotas controlled choice in school choice and house allocation and scheduling and curriculum constraints in course allocation we develop new mechanisms that are ex ante efficient and fair in these environments and that incorporate certain non additive substitutable preferences we also develop a utility guarantee technique that limits ex post unfairness in random allocations supplementing the ex ante fairness promoted by randomization this can be applied to multi unit assignment problems and certain two sided matching problems jel c78 d82

do farmers value the environment evidence from a conservation reserve program auction the paper uses data from one conservation reserve program crp auction to elicit farmers attitudes toward the environment by analyzing their bids the crp pays farmers to remove chosen plots of land from agricultural production and put them to a conservation use an interesting aspect of this auction is that winners are determined by a combination of low bids and environmental scores of individual plots using decision theoretic approach to model this auction we show that farmers condition their bids on the strength of their environmental scores and that they value environmental benefits especially those that increase future soil productivity of their land

optimal allocation without money an engineering approach we study the allocation of heterogeneous services to agents with incomplete information and without monetary transfers agents have private multidimensional utilities over services drawn from commonly known priors the social planner s goal is to maximize a potentially complex public objective for tractability we take an engineering approach in which we solve a large market approximation and convert the solution into a feasible finite market mechanism that still yields good results we apply this framework to real data from boston to design a mechanism that assigns students to public schools in order to maximize a linear combination of utilitarian and max min welfare subject to capacity and transportation constraints we show how to optimally solve a large market formulation with more than 868 types of students and 77 schools and we translate the solution into a finite market mechanism that significantly outperforms the baseline plan chosen by the city in terms of efficiency equity and predic

some further properties of the cumulative offer process we investigate extension resource monotonicity and respecting improvements properties of the cumulative offer process cop extension monotonicity says that no doctor is to be better off whenever others start preferring more contracts to being unmatched resource monotonicity on the other hand requires that no doctor becomes worse off whenever hospitals start hiring more doctors the cop becomes extension and resource monotonic whenever contracts are unilateral substitutes us satisfying an irrelevance of rejected contracts condition irc this result implies that the cop is population monotonic under us and the irc we then turn to the respecting improvements property which states that no doctor should be harmed if some of his contracts become more popular with an additional law of aggregate demand condition we show that the cop respects improvements

matching with contracts we develop a model of matching with contracts which incorporates as special cases the college admissions problem the kelso crawford labor market matching model and ascending package auctions we introduce a new law of aggregate demand for the case of discrete heterogeneous workers and show that when workers are substitutes this law is satisfied by profit maximizing firms when workers are substitutes and the law is satisfied truthful reporting is a dominant strategy for workers in a worker offering auction matching algorithm we also parameterize a large class of preferences satisfying the two conditions

semiparametric estimation of the optimal reserve price in first price auctions the optimal reserve price in the independent private value paradigm is generally expressed as a functional of the latent distribution of private signals which is by nature unobserved this feature has limited the implementation of the optimal reserve price in practice in this article we consider first price auctions within the general affiliated private values paradigm we show that the seller s expected profit can be written as a functional of the observed bid distribution we propose a semiparametric extremum estimator for estimating consistently the optimal reserve price from observed bids as an illustration we consider the outer continental shelf ocs wildcat auctions

auctions with resale markets an application to u s forest service timber sales when bidders anticipate an opportunity for resale trade the value of winning an auction is determined in part by the option values of buying and selling in the secondary market one implication is that a bidder s willingness to pay at an auction increases with the expected level of competition between resale buyers empirical evidence from auctions of timber contracts supports this prediction and rejects standard models that ignore resale the estimated effect is smaller after policy changes expected to diminish the prevalence of resale additional evidence supports the predicted presence of a common value element introduced by the resale opportunity

potential impacts of biofuel development on food security in botswana a contribution to energy policy abstract biofuel development continues to be a critical development strategy in africa because it promises to be an important part of the emerging bio economy however there is a growing concern that the pattern of biofuel development is not always consistent with the principles of sustainable development this paper assesses the potential of the impacts of biofuel development on food security in botswana drawing on informal and semi structured interviews the paper concludes that there is potential for the development of biofuels in botswana without adverse effects on food security due mainly to availability of idle land which accounted for 72 of agricultural land in the eastern part of the country in 2008 it is suggested that farmers could be incentivized to produce energy crops and more food from such land although it is hypothesized that the implementation of biofuel development programmes in other countries had an impact on local commodity prices during the period 2005 2008 in botswana it is argued that local biofuel production may not necessarily lead to a substantial increase in commodity food prices because land availability is not a major issue the paper makes policy recommendations for sustainable biofuel development in botswana

space for innovation for sustainable community based biofuel production and use lessons learned for policy from nhambita community mozambique abstract this paper provides insights and recommendations for policy on the opportunities and constrains that influence the space for innovation for sustainable community based biofuel production and use promoted by the mozambican government nhambita community established jatropha trials in 2005 initial results were promising but crop failure and the absence of organized markets led to scepticism amongst farmers we start from the idea that the promotion of community based biofuel production and use requires taking interactions between social cultural biophysical economic political and legal subsystems across different scales and levels of analysis through time into account our analysis demonstrates that heterogeneous farming strategies and their synergies at community level should be carefully assessed furthermore national and international political and legal developments such as the development of biofuel sustainability criteria influence the local space in which community based biofuel developments take place we conclude that ex ante integrated assessment and creating an enabling environment can enhance space for sustainable community based biofuel production and use it may provide insights into the opportunities and constraints for different types of smallholders and promote the development of adequate policy mechanisms to prevent biofuels from becoming a threat rather than an opportunity for smallholders

school choice impossibilities for affirmative action abstract this paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice we show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences specifically we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority student the purported beneficiaries under any stable matching mechanism furthermore we show that another famous mechanism the top trading cycles mechanism suffers from the same drawback

biofuel developments in mozambique update and analysis of policy potential and reality abstract climate change rising oil prices and concerns about future energy supplies have contributed to a growing interest in using biomass for energy purposes several studies have highlighted the biophysical potential of biofuel production on the african continent and analysts see mozambique as one of the most promising african countries favorable growing conditions and the availability of land water and labor are mentioned as major drivers behind this potential moreover the potential of biofuel production to generate socio economic benefits is reflected in the government s policy objectives for the development of the sector such as reducing fuel import dependency and creating rural employment this article provides an overview of biofuel developments in mozambique and explores to what extent reality matches the suggested potential in the country we conclude that biofuel developments mainly take place in areas near good infrastructure processing and storage facilities where there is skilled labor available and access to services and goods moreover our analysis shows the need to timely harmonize current trends in biofuel developments with the government s policy objectives as the majority of existing and planned projects are not focusing on remote rural areas and in absence of domestic markets principally target external markets

identification of standard auction models this paper presents new identification results for models of first price second price ascending english and descending dutch auctions we consider a general specification of the latent demand and information structure nesting both private values and common values models and allowing correlated types as well as ex ante asymmetry we address identification of a series of nested models and derive testable restrictions enabling discrimination between models on the basis of observed data the simplest model symmetric independent private values is nonparametrically identified even if only the transaction price from each auction is observed for richer models identification and testable restrictions may be obtained when additional information of one or more of the following types is available i the identity of the winning bidder or other bidders ii one or more bids in addition to the transaction price iii exogenous variation in the number of bidders iv bidder specific covariates while many private values pv models are nonparametrically identified and testable with commonly available data identification of common values cv models requires stringent assumptions nonetheless the pv model can be tested against the cv alternative even when neither model is identified

on responsiveness of top trading cycles mechanism to priority based affirmative action abstract in school choice priority based affirmative action favors minority students by means of promoting their priority ranking at schools this paper investigates the responsiveness of the top trading cycles mechanism to priority based affirmative action when schools priority structure satisfies a certain acyclicity condition when schools priority under the problem without affirmative action satisfies virtual homogeneity condition a weak responsiveness result is obtained

biofuel production and its impact on food security in low and middle income countries implications for the post 2015 sustainable development goals abstract the post 2015 sustainable development goals sdgs aim to strengthen the achievements of the millennium development goals mdgs there are 17 sdgs the first two tackle ending poverty and hunger as well as food insecurity under nutrition and sustainable agriculture to address these goals requires eradicating chronic hunger this paper examines challenges associated with biofuel production and how they relate to sdgs and their targets we mainly focus on challenges associated with biofuel production not adequately addressed in the sdgs it draws from a range of peer reviewed and grey literature to advance the understanding of how biofuel production will impact the post 2015 development agenda the findings suggest that increasing use of food crops to produce biofuels in the united states european union japan and brazil has been one important element in explaining the steady rise in staple food prices since 2000 while this is a potential threat to food and nutrition security in low and middle income countries biofuel production also offers significant opportunities in low income countries there are several challenges to the development and harnessing of biofuels these include 1 the interaction between biofuel production and climate change 2 biofuel production and foreignisation of land 3 food wastage 4 poor governance and limited production capacity 5 biofuel production within a weak and fragmented policy framework 6 biofuel production land tenure and socio economic impacts 7 biofuel production and conflicts and 8 biofuel production and deforestation for the post 2015 sustainable development agenda to have an impact strong actions are required to protect rural communities as well as nurture the biofuels industry this should be matched by commensurate investments in food and nutrition security and transparent public private partnerships this calls for strong and pro poor policies on feedstock farming processing and trading such policies must address the rhetoric of stakeholder participation in land use management

competition in the economic crisis analysis of procurement auctions we study the effects of the recent economic crisis on firms bidding behavior and markups in sealed bid auctions using data from austrian construction procurements we estimate bidders construction costs within a private value auction model we find that markups of all bids submitted decrease by 1 5 percentage points in the recent economic crisis markups of winning bids decrease by 3 3 percentage points we also find that without the government stimulus package this decrease would have been larger these two pieces of evidence point to pro cyclical markups

how to control controlled school choice we characterize choice rules for schools that regard students as substitutes while expressing preferences for a diverse student body the stable or fair assignment of students to schools requires the latter to regard the former as substitutes such a requirement is in conflict with the reality of schools preferences for diversity we show that the conflict can be useful in the sense that certain unique rules emerge from imposing both considerations we also provide welfare comparisons for students when different choice rules are employed

integrated assessment of sustainability trade offs and pathways for global bioenergy production framing a novel hybrid approach abstract current controversies and debates on bioenergy production in the areas of greenhouse gases emission reduction food and energy security social exclusion and welfare erosion and ecosystem deterioration attest to the challenges which the bioenergy sector has to overcome to achieve its global production potentials because it is yet an evolving sector the sustainability of bioenergy production in different regions is very elusive experiences show that bioenergy policies in one region can have impacts not only on its own but also on other regions social economic and ecological sustainability it is thus important to assess development pathways for bioenergy to exploit the potential benefits and forestall any unnecessary costs this paper frames a novel hybrid approach for assessing bioenergy potentials for regions with diverging economic social and ecological systems the approach is based on a conceptual framework that takes into account trade offs decisions on sustainability goals and production options in the assessment of bioenergy pathways it combines different empirical techniques for the systematic investigation of trade offs and pathways including fuzzy logic conjoint logit and path analyses to show the relevance and utility of these techniques for the integrated assessment of trade offs and pathways in bioenergy development we illustrated their application using results and data from previous related studies

biofuels development in sub saharan africa are the policies conducive this paper analyses national regional and international biofuels policies and strategies to assess whether these policies promote or undermine the development of biofuels sector in africa despite having a huge comparative advantage in land labour and good climatic conditions favourable for the growing of energy crops few countries in sub saharan africa have included biofuels strategies in their energy or national development policies further results show that while developed countries commit huge financial resources for research technology development and the provision of tax incentives to both producers and consumers there is little government support for promoting biofuels in africa although the consequences of biofuels on food supply remain uncertain the mandatory blending of biofuels with fossil fuels by industrialized countries will create demand for land in africa for the growing of energy crops for biofuels this paper urgently calls upon national governments in sub saharan africa to develop appropriate strategies and regulatory frameworks to harness the potential economic opportunities from biofuels sector development while protecting the environment and rural communities from the adverse effects of land alienation from the mainstream agriculture towards the growing of energy crops for biofuels at the expense of traditional food crops

responsive affirmative action in school choice a comparison study abstract this note provides a comparison study on responsiveness of two extensively used mechanisms to affirmative action in school choice for priority based affirmative action we show that if a stronger priority based affirmative action favors minority students by giving full priority to the minority then such a policy makes each minority student weakly better off under the student proposing deferred acceptance henceforth da mechanism however the top trading cycles henceforth ttc mechanism does not satisfy this property under the da mechanism if the original problem gives full priority to the minority then the assignment of minority students does not change when the problem moves to a higher level of affirmative action on the contrary this property does not hold under the ttc mechanism

the geographic and sectoral patterns of large scale farmland investments in sub saharan africa following the food and energy price crises of the mid 2000s sub saharan africa has become one of the largest recipients for large scale farmland investments while much has been written on the phenomenon scant reliable empirical evidence is available as to the precise geographic and sectoral patterns and underlying drivers employing strict data quality requirements this paper addresses these knowledge gaps by analyzing 563 farmland projects that have been established between 2005 and 2013 in sub saharan africa findings show that the investment intensity and associated risks are not geographically uniform moreover the study highlights a number of popular misconceptions regarding investor origin and their sectoral interests and motives

arriving in time estimation of english auctions with a stochastic number of bidders we develop a new econometric approach for the estimation of second price ascending bid auctions with a stochastic number of bidders our empirical framework considers the arrival process of new bidders as well as the distribution of bidders valuations of objects being auctioned by observing the timing of bidder arrival the model is identified even when the number of potential bidders is stochastic and unknown the relevance of our approach is illustrated with an empirical application using a unique dataset of art auctions on ebay our results suggest a higher impact of sellers reputation on bidders valuations than previously reported in cross sectional studies but the impact of reputation on bidder arrival is largely insignificant interestingly a seller s reputation impacts not only the actions of the bidders but the actions of the seller as well in particular experience and a good reputation increase the probability of a seller posting items for sale on longer lasting auctions which we find inc

the winner s curse reserve prices and endogenous entry empirical insights from ebay auctions internet auctions have recently gained widespread popularity and are one of the most successful forms of electronic commerce we examine a unique data set of ebay coin auctions to explore the determinants of bidder and seller behavior we begin by documenting a number of empirical regularities in our data set of ebay auctions next we specify and estimate a structural econometric model of bidding on ebay using our parameter estimates from this model we measure the extent of the winner s curse and simulate seller revenue under different reserve prices

child auctions in nineteenth century sweden an analysis of price differences during the nineteenth century destitute and or orphan swedish children were boarded out as a part of that time s public assistance the families to which they were allocated were determined by means of english auctions this paper studies the price differences among such children using empirical data from 601 auctions price is regressed on variables related both to the buyer and to the child the results suggest that variables related to the children s characteristics were important and that the willingness to take a poor or orphan child was dependent on the foster parents uses for a child in the household children who were old enough to be used as shepherd boys or girls were easily placed it was worse with those who were feeble incapacitated blind sick mentally deranged or confined to their beds they were useless to farmers and others as a rule the most miserable were boarded out to the poorest of the non property owners julius ejdestam 1969 the poor s sweden my translation