energy transitions in small scale regions what we can learn from a regional innovation systems perspective the prevalent theories in the debate on sustainability transitions have been criticised for not sufficiently addressing energy change processes at the local level this paper aims to enhance our understanding of local energy reorganisation processes drawing on the regional innovation systems ris approach we argue that local development dynamics result from the interaction of various subsystems science politics public administration industry finance intermediaries and civil society the analysis of the involved subsystems and their interaction shows how energy transitions are shaped by different individual and organisational actors as well as institutions on the local level empirical evidence from case studies on the german cities of emden and bottrop illustrates our theoretical conceptualisation of energy transitions we conclude by presenting characteristic interaction patterns for energy transition drawn from the two cases

organisation and governance of urban energy systems district heating and cooling in the uk a number of uk urban authorities are developing combined heat and power chp with district heating and cooling dhc networks as a means to achieve local sustainable and affordable energy and to contribute to economic regeneration findings from case study research in three uk cities are used to explore the local energy governance and organisation lego models adopted in the context of privatised centralised energy markets local developers are reliant on sources of social capital to make systems work given limited support from public policy and limited access to finance local actors drawing on non local community energy and commercial and technical networks of expertise work to introduce the technology into strategic planning establish its legitimacy and the legitimacy of a form of multi organisation suited to numerous stakeholders secure finance negotiate risks and responsibilities and engage with energy markets designed for large scale centralised provision for dhc to make a fully effective contribution to uk sustainable urban energy a more supportive government policy framework offsetting the difficulties of a centralised energy market will be needed to maximise the benefit of locally knowledgeable action the policy framework must be responsive to the specificity of locally appropriate configurations of actors and material infrastructure

effects of short sale ban on financial liquidity in crisis and non crisis periods a propensity score matching approach abstractwe investigate the impact of banning the short selling shorting ban on liquidity of stocks traded in the hong kong stock exchange hkex on the basis of the 20 revisions of the designated list of shortable stocks from january 2006 to december 2010 in order to avoid endogeneity due to the liquidity adaptive implementation of the ban policy we use the propensity score matching of shortable and unshortable stocks and apply the double and triple difference methods embedded in the fixed effect panel regression for the matched data using two outcome variables for illiquidity the amihud price impact measure and the bid ask spread our results suggests that the shorting ban in this market may have a liquidity supporting effect in terms of the price impact with no regard to market tranquility and in terms of the spread with regard to the 2008 2009 financial crisis

two stage rent seeking contests with carryovers we examine a two stage contest in which players in twogroups compete noncooperatively to win a rent in thefirst stage each group selects a finalist the twofinalists compete for the rent in the second stage first stage efforts are carried over to the secondstage in the sense that they are partly effective inthe second stage as well we show the following inthe case of player specific carryovers therent dissipation rate increases in the carryover rate with the carryover rate equal to one the rent isfully dissipated in the case of group specificcarryovers however the rent dissipation rate isindependent of the carryover rate

the verticality of policy mixes for sustainability transitions a case study of solar water heating in china abstract climate change and sustainable development are the defining challenges of the modern era the field of sustainability transitions seeks systematic solutions for fundamental transformations of socio technical systems towards sustainability and exploring the role of policy mixes has been a central research agenda within the field in the extant literature there exists a lack of both conceptual and empirical research on the vertical dimension of policy mixes for sustainability transitions this study provides a multilevel and evolutionary interpretation of the vertical interactions of policy mixes in the process of industrial path development towards sustainability transitions an exemplary case of solar water heating swh technology in shandong province in china is presented capturing both the bottom up and top down processes of interactions on the one hand urban level policy initiatives can inform higher level policymaking on the other hand national level priorities can greatly configure policy strategies for lower level governments moreover as the industry matures the interactions of multilevel policy mixes evolve from simpler unidirectional patterns to more complex bidirectional ones through a vertical policy learning feedback mechanism this study generates two important policy implications that extend beyond the chinese context first dynamic vertical interactions between multilevel governments indicate the need to develop more nuanced perspectives on the design of policy mixes second policy makers need to hold a more dynamic view of policy mixes by recognizing their temporal and coevolutionary nature through the policy learning process

the governance of sustainable socio technical transitions a quasi evolutionary model of socio technical transitions is described in which regimes face selection pressures continuously differentiated transition contexts determine the form and direction of regime change in response to these pressures the articulation of pressures and the degree to which responses are coordinated and based on resources available within the regime define the transition context four alternative contexts are described endogenous renewal re orientation of trajectories emergent transformation and purposive transitions agency and power in the governance of regime transformation are analysed power to affect change depends on regime membership the distribution of resources for change and expectations

rent seeking and entry abstract it is the purpose of this paper to develop a market equilibrium model of rent seeking with entry the model determines the optimal amount of rent seeking activities by individuals the equilibrium number of rent seekers and hence also the total amount of rent seeking in the industry

influencing rent seeking contests this paper shows that a policy that uniformly increases contestants effort costs can lead to an increase in total effort in asymmetric settings this levels the playing field and therefore encourages weaker players who otherwise would have stayed out to enter paradoxically a contest designer whose only objective is to maximize total effort may thus wish to make rent seeking more difficult these results suggest that the often lamented bureaucratic red tape might in fact be a rational response to the problem of attracting lobbyists to participate in a contest

transfer seeking and avoidance on the full social costs of rent seeking we would like to thank gordon tullock and an anonymous referee of this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

innovation and policy for bioenergy in the uk a co evolutionary perspective de laurentis c innovation and policy for bioenergy in the uk a co evolutionary perspective regional studies this paper analyses the role of niche innovation and regime interaction in the field of renewable energy in the uk adopting a co evolutionary approach and a dynamic multilevel perspective on system innovation it investigates niches development in the uk in the field of bioenergy and its interaction with the current energy regime contributing to the debate about spatial scales at which sustainability transitions can be conceptualized the paper utilizes the case of niche development in the region of wales to provide supporting evidence of the importance of context specific social and political relations that may foster or hinder regime transformation

collective rent dissipation the theory of rent seeking was initiated by tullock 1967 1980 followed by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 and more recently extended in various directions by allard 1988 appelbaum and katz 1986a b c gradstein and nitzan 1989 hillman and katz 1984 1987 hillman and samet 1987 hillman and riley 1989 katz et al 1990 long and vousden 1987 ursprung 1990 and varian 1989 the purpose of this paper is to extend this theory by introducing the possibility of collective group rent seeking with voluntary individual decisions regarding their extent of participation in the collective rent seeking efforts

directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities this paper propses directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities as a general concept that embraces a wide range of recently analyzed economic activities including the subset of rent seeking activities considered by krueger it then proceeds to provide a synthesis and generalization of the welfare theoretic analysis of such activities by developing a fourfold categorization of cases depending on the levels of distortions before and after the dup activity thus a unification and overview of the subject are achieved

on the social costs of rent seeking versus the social costs of production flexibility in this paper an analysis is provided of two alternative methods of defensive behaviour by a firm first rent seeking and second potential adjustment by way of investing in product flexibility from the analysis it emerges that at times rent seeking may be socially superior less socially wasteful to other more traditional means of responding to threats this paper therefore suggests that in circumstances where some type of defensive or aggressive activity by firms is available rent seeking while constituting gross social waste may be a net social gain given the alternative options available to the firm

seeking rents by setting rents the political economy of rent seeking in recent years there has been a large number of papers on the subject of rent seeking most such works on rent seeking have taken the rent as exogenously determined by regulators regulators howeve r may also be expected and indeed have been shown to be rent seeke rs and hence the determination of the rent itself should be endogeniz ed to reflect the fact that the rent setters are themselves rent se ekers in this paper the authors do this by presenting an analysis o f the interaction of regulators firms and consumers within a rent s eeking framework where all three groups are assumed to be self motiva ted the analysis is carried out under alternative assumptions regard ing the nature of the market and the reaction functions of the partic ipants policy implications are drawn where appropriate copyright 1987 by royal economic society

escaping carbon lock in this article explores the climate policy implications of the arguments made in understanding carbon lock in unruh 2000 which posited that industrial countries have become locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through path dependent processes driven by increasing returns to scale carbon lock in arises through technological organizational social and institutional co evolution culminating in what was termed as techno institutional complex tic in order to resolve the climate problem an escape from the lock in condition is required however due to the self referential nature of tic escape conditions are unlikely to be generated internally and it is argued here that exogenous forces are probably required

london and beyond taking a closer look at urban energy policy this paper considers the field of urban energy policy a neglected yet important topic cities account for approximately two thirds of global primary energy consumption creating significant benefits and costs as a result there has been growing interest in the contribution of cities to global energy policy issues such as climate change but a number of significant questions remain e g how do energy policy processes differ between national and urban scales and how can cities contribute most effectively to global policy goals we present the results of interviews with key stakeholders in london to illustrate some unique features of the urban energy policy cycle we then take a wider view proposing a research agenda with three key goals describing the global variety of urban energy consumption and policy understanding the resulting diversity in responsibility vulnerability and capacity and developing shared procedures and solutions tackling these questions is vital if cities are to contribute fully to current energy policy efforts

short sales constraints and price discovery evidence from the hong kong market short sales practices in the hong kong stock market are unique in that only stocks on a list of designated securities can be sold short by analyzing the price effects following the addition of individual stocks to the list we find that short sales constraints tend to cause stock overvaluation and that the overvaluation effect is more dramatic for individual stocks for which wider dispersion of investor opinions exists these findings are consistent with miller s 1977 intuition and other optimism models we also document higher volatility and less positive skewness of individual stock returns when short sales are allowed the question of how short sales impact capital markets is highly controversial with short sale regulations varying widely across countries and capital markets 1 although short selling has been carried out for years in major financial markets around the world its effects on market efficiency especially on pricing efficiency remain of interest to financial researchers miller 1977 theorizes that in the presence of short sales constraints security prices tend to reflect a more optimistic valuation than the average opinion of potential investors and thus tend to be upward biased this overvaluation argument is based on two conditions 1 a security s short sales are either prohibited or costly and 2 investors have heterogeneous beliefs or information about the security s value the underlying intuition is quite straightforward pessimistic investors are forced to sit out of the market when short sales are not available and thus some negative information is not reflected in prices enabling enthusiastic buyers to bid prices above the level that average investors perceive as fair this argument has significant implications for market efficiency theories since one of the major functions of capital markets is price discovery indeed an efficient market should be a market in which prices always

leadership and expenditures in rent seeking models the theory of rent seeking begun by tullock 1967 krueger 1974 and posner 1975 is now well established the analysis of these models typically involves studying properties of the symmetric noncooperative nash equilibrium defined in terms of pure strategies rent seeking expenditures in a 1980 article tullock first noted and in 1984 later elaborated upon several situations where the traditional nash equilibrium of equal rent seeking payments by identical players failed to exist this failure could arise for two reasons first even though the second order conditions were satisfied at the candidate symmetric equilibrium point 2 once at that point all agents had a conditional incentive to choose zero rent seeking to avoid negative payoffs thus the traditional point while locally optimal as indicated by the second order conditions was not globally optimal the second possible reason for failure was that at the traditional point the second order conditions were violated the problems arise because r a parameter affecting the conditional probability of successful rent seeking may be too large the principal consequence is that the traditional model with myopic agents does not capture some of the potential behaviour of the players a particularly worrisome feature is that agents may find it privately optimal to spend in total more on rentseeking than the value of the prize as well benefits sometimes accrue to agents if they can block entry by preemptive play tullock 1984 97 has conjectured that there is another game in the precommitment stage in which the parties attempt to make the first commitment so that no one else will enter in this paper we consider a two player noncooperative rent seeking game where agents are allowed to adopt and potentially benefit from other than a passive stance towards their rivals firms must choose to be either leaders or followers and consistent with that decision and their beliefs about their rivals strategies then choose their rent seeking expenditures firms thus have the option of becoming stakelberg leaders or stakelberg followers 3 the analysis begins insection 2 we provide three principal results that serve to characterize the range of possible equilibria the results critically depend

on the limits to rent seeking waste the general equilibrium framework developed in this paper for analyzing the limits to rent seeking waste goes beyond the existing literature by incorporating tax financed public subsidies and rent protecting activities into a rent seeking environment we show that the limits to rent seeking waste depend on the extent to which government subsidizes rent seekers and rent defenders through tax financed grants contracts and favors as observed by tullock 1967 the diversion of resources toward efforts to acquire a monopoly rent causes a social waste in addition to the excess burden of monopoly pricing measured by the harberger triangle in the absence of government subsidies to rent seeking and under competitive conditions this additional waste cannot exceed the maximum monopoly rent attainable however if government subsidizes expenditures on rent seeking then the additional waste can exceed the tullock rectangle of monopoly rent and in the limit equal the economy s maximum potential social surplus

monopoly deregulation in the presence of tullock activities we give the condition for a welfare improving monopoly deregulation when the decision making process cannot be insulated from tullock activities and players are risk neutral

using network analysis to understand public policy for wave energy abstract the uk s wave energy sector is at a pre commercial stage transitioning from prototype demonstration towards a revenue supported industry a host of advantages that could be realised through successful commercialisation include the potential to generate 40 50 twh yr 3 7bn of export and 10 000 jobs by 2020 with tidal despite this criticisms have been made about the lack of coordination between funding bodies communication between stakeholders and overly centralised actors although the value of strong problem solving networks has been noted problems arise in validating the presence nature and value of relationships as well as identification of tacit and informal linkages here network analysis is used to validate these criticisms and provide insight into sector activities it is shown that although high levels of interaction are occurring overall there are wide disparities prime movers are clearly present and less mature developers are isolated from the system as it develops norms and practices this combined with government fund gating has led to a matthew effect whereby some have access to finance and are shaping institutional norms while others struggle although convergence is expected a lack of public sector coordination transparency of decision making and comparability between devices has reduced both investor and stakeholder legitimacy

individual investor perceptions and behavior during the financial crisis combining monthly survey data with matching trading records we examine how individual investor perceptions change and drive trading and risk taking behavior during the 2008 2009 financial crisis we find that investor perceptions fluctuate significantly during the crisis with risk tolerance and risk perceptions being less volatile than return expectations during the worst months of the crisis investors return expectations and risk tolerance decrease while their risk perceptions increase towards the end of the crisis investor perceptions recover we document substantial swings in trading and risk taking behavior that are driven by changes in investor perceptions overall individual investors continue to trade actively and do not de risk their investment portfolios during the crisis

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking a comment although corcoran is mathematically correct i believe his comment is not very helpful in order to discuss the matter in some detail the reader should consult table 7 1 from my original efficient rent seeking reproduced on page 92 1 this shows the equilibrium investment of each individual different numbers of individuals playing the game n and differing values of r table 7 2 also reproduced on page 93 shows the total investment

risk averse rent seekers and the social cost of monopoly power there is now quite general recognition that the social cost of monopoly power encompasses the resources expended by individuals seeking to become the beneficiaries of monopoly rents however since the activity of rent seeking is generally not observable direct estimates of resources expended in quests to acquire monopoly power are usually impossible to come by 1 as a consequence the indirect approach of taking the observed value of monopoly rents as indicative of the unobserved value of the resources expended in rent seeking is quite generally adopted in approaches to evaluation of the social cost of such activity

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking the lure of excess profits or rents associated with monopoly power gives rise to expenditures to obtain these rents competitive rent seeking behavior is recognized as a factor which must be included among the wastes associated with monopoly power tullock 1967 posner 1975 1 the expenditures are aimed at transferring wealth rather than its creation and the use of resources to obtain this transfer is a loss to society how important rent seeking is as a part of the total monopolistic waste hinges on the size of the total expenditures induced by a given level of excess profits

rent seeking with non identical sharing rules the primary object of this paper is to examine the role of differential sharing rules within a collective rent seeking setting on the possible non existence of nash equilibrium focusing on groups that distribute part of the rent equally among their members and the residual according to relative effort we show that in rent seeking societies applying the two polar sharing rules equilibrium never exists in the general case where groups apply different but not necessarily the polar sharing rules we study the relationship between group variability in distributing rents and the problem of non existence of equilibrium in the rent seeking game

uncertain monopoly rent and the social cost of rent seeking abstract assuming that monopoly rent is uncertain we derive a dissipation rate formula that generalizes the hillman and katz formula we show that for large enough variance the dissipation rate increases with mean monopoly rent

uk local authority engagement with the energy service company esco model key characteristics benefits limitations and considerations abstract this paper explores how some uk local authorities las have opted to engage with the energy service company esco model in a bid to enhance their influence over local energy system change and help them to deliver on their political public good objectives three common approaches to la esco model engagement are outlined including the 1 la owned arm s length model 2 private sector owned concession agreement model and 3 community owned and run model the la s decision to establish its own esco or alternatively enter into a partnership with another predominantly depends on its willingness to expose itself to risk the level of strategic control it desires and the resources it has at its disposal however the business case is contingent on the extent to which the national policy and regulatory framework facilitates and obligates las to play an active energy governance role stronger alignment of local and national energy agendas through communication and coordination between different governance actors could help to remove critical barriers to la esco engagement and their wider energy governance activities

consumer resistance and monopoly behavior under franchise contestability the probability of a deregulation under anti monopoly consumer lobby is generated at the cournot nash equilibrium of a lobbying game which depends on the monopoly rent and the deadweight loss this probability is increasing and convex in monopoly price when the deregulation probability constraint is binding the monopolist s price rises with the number of consumers the competitive price and the given ceiling probability the social cost of a monopoly under franchise contestability differs from the posner measure

rent seeking behaviour of retaliating agents this paper has examined a rent seeking game where the players take a more sophisticated approach to evaluating the potential strategies and counter strategies of their rivals than in the standard nash case we have derived the conditions for the existence of symmetric and nonsymmetric equilibria for the game and derived the properties of these equilibria three results merit repeating first we find that rent dissipation will not in general be complete second and in contrast to much of the traditional literature we find that the socially optimal result of zero rent seeking is sometimes a feasible equilibrium outcome for our game finally there exist rent seeking configurations in which the best play of one of the rivals is to withdraw from the game or alternatively stated where it is not optimal for a rival to contest the rent by entering the game in these nonsymmetric cases it would appear that tullock s conjecture about the value of preemptive moves remains valid this is true even when the strategies and counter strategies available to the players are much more complex than in the traditional nash approach

emerging in between the multi level governance of renewable energy in the english regions abstract analysis explains the emergence of a regional dimension to the multi level governance of renewable energy in england the case sits in a tense yet informative position between the two poles of ordered and messy multi level governance these tensions which are currently debilitating could be rendered more creative and fruitful if greater authority was devolved to the regions and if policy learning between the regions and the central government was institutionalised more deeply improved legitimacy and accountability mechanisms must accompany increased authority however english ambivalence over regionalisation generally means such changes are unlikely