truth telling and nash equilibria in minimum cost spanning tree models abstract in this paper we consider the minimum cost spanning tree model we assume that a central planner aims at implementing a minimum cost spanning tree not knowing the true link costs the central planner sets up a game where agents announce link costs a tree is chosen and costs are allocated according to the rules of the game we characterize ways of allocating costs such that true announcements constitute nash equilibria both in case of full and incomplete information in particular we find that the shapley rule based on the irreducible cost matrix is consistent with truthful announcements while a series of other well known rules such as the bird rule serial equal split and the proportional rule are not

what makes basic research economically useful abstract economic analysis has helped us understand the strong economic dimension in the explosive growth of science and more recently the reasons for continuing public subsidies however the growing domination of the market failure approach has led to the analytical neglect of two major questions for policy makers how does science contribute to technology are the technological benefits from science increasingly becoming international on the former too much attention has been devoted to the relatively narrow range of scientific fields producing knowledge with direct technological applications and too little to the much broader range of fields the skills of which contribute to most technologies on the latter national systems of science and of technology remain closely coupled in most major countries in spite of the technological activities of large multinational firms empirical research is needed on concentration scale and efficiency in the performance of basic research where techniques and insights from the applied economics of industrial r d are of considerable relevance there is no convincing evidence so far of unexploited economies of scale in basic research this evidence shows that many policies for greater selectivity and concentration in basic research have been misconceived economists and other social scientists could help by formulating more persuasive justifications for public subsidy for basic research and by making more realistic assumptions about the nature of science and technology

global and domestic utilization of industrial relevant science patent citation analysis of science technology interactions and knowledge flows abstract the development of science based technologies may draw heavily on codified and tacit outputs from both domestic research bases and foreign sources having a view of the scientific underpinnings of these technical innovations and related knowledge diffusion and utilization processes especially those concerning public financed basic research is of major importance to policymakers nowadays some of those scientific and technical inputs are pivotal to technical inventions and are acknowledged as such by explicit references citations to related research papers in the reference list on the corresponding patents this case study deals with citations to dutch authored research papers on uspto patents granted during the period 1987 1996 results of the citation analysis reveal several important features of contributions made by the dutch science base to dutch invented and or foreign invented patents such as 1 a marked overall increase of patent citations to dutch research papers and 2 significant differences between domestic and foreign citation patterns where 3 domestic citation links are dominated by author inventor self citations and patents originating from the large r d intensive multinational firms such as philips these findings provide new empirical evidence that patent citation analysis produces systemic quantitative data providing strategic background information regarding nation specific and sector specific factors in domestic and cross border science technology linkages and knowledge flows

the economic impact of industry funded university r d abstract in recent years industry has increased its direct funding of university r d this article examines whether such collaborative r d leads to increases in technological innovation in industry data are analyzed for the years 1953 through 1986 it is found that direct industry funding of university research is associated with subsequent increases in industry r d expenditures these expenditures include funding from both federal and industry sources this increase in r d expenditures occurs with a median lag of five years rival hypotheses are examined such as the effect of general university research expenditures however these hypotheses are rejected this article concludes by raising significant implications for policy

horizontal diversification in the danish national system of innovation the case of pharmaceuticals abstract the importance of advanced users in home markets as an inducement to technological innovation is now well recognised thereby providing an explanation for important parts of international export specialisation at the theoretical level upstream downstream interaction has been made the generic micro foundation of theories of national systems of innovation however this paper will argue that user producer interaction is not the only country specific inducement mechanism to innovation rather the finding of this paper is in line with the proposition that when firms are science based linkages tend to be horizontal rather than vertical the paper mobilises historical and bibliometric methods to trace the long term development of technology at the danish pharmaceutical company novo nordisk and its links with the local particularly university environment the paper demonstrates the importance of science based competencies in moving from natural resource based technologies to those of greater sophistication thereby influencing trade specialisation of advanced countries

science dependence of technologies evidence from inventions and their inventors abstract articulating a compelling economic rationale to justify investments in research by definition furthest removed from direct immediate economic benefit is perhaps one of chief challenges of r d managers policy makers and science analysts in the years ahead although several innovation studies and surveys have provided some convincing empirical evidence of impacts and benefits of research to technical progress there is still an urgent need for comprehensive models reliable data and analytical tools to describe and monitor links between r d and industrial innovation in more detail as for the role of scientific and engineering research in the innovation process this paper reports on the findings of a novel methodology to increase our understanding of the contribution of research efforts to successful technical inventions the approach is based on a nation wide mail survey amongst inventors working in the corporate sector and the public research sector in the netherlands the inventors inside information regarding their patented inventions and related technological innovations on the market provided a range of quantitative data on the importance of the underpinning research activities statistical models attempting to explain the degree of science dependence of the inventions identify a range of relevant variables covering the inventor s own capabilities and previous r d achievements external information sources as well as the inventor s r d environment in general some 20 of the private sector innovations turned out to be partially based on public sector research furthermore citations in patents referring to basic research literature were found to be invalid indictors of a technology s science dependence

is western europe losing the technological race abstract using a variety of indicators this paper compares technological levels in japan the usa and w europe there is no justification for assuming general european technological backwardness whilst it lags in electronics and since 1975 has had a relatively slow rate of growth of innovative activities it also has sectors of strength chemicals machinery production engineering and countries whose relative commitments of resources to innovative activities are at least equal and sometimes superior to those of japan and the usa frg sweden switzerland its main policy challenges are to increase the rate of growth of innovative activities in lagging countries and to ensure pervasive applications of information technology similarly there is no convincing evidence that w europe is relatively backward in converting technology into economically efficient innovations some policy problems are significant in all three regions skill shortages whilst others are in the usa and w europe short term planning horizons of top management particular european problems are the effects of social legislation on worker flexibility and mobility of national regulations on intra european competition and of slow rates of growth of output on the growth of innovative activities japan and the usa have their problems with the latter continuously under challenge from the former and increasingly specialised in defence and raw materials related technologies

how valuable is on farm work to farmers in this article we estimate a rural household model that allows specific tastes for working on farm and can fit the data as well as the general model of lopez we use two samples that are matched by individual characteristics and adopt the method for matched surveys proposed by arellano and meghir we replicate using french data the empirical finding of elhorst who reports evidence that implicit wages of on farm family labor are significantly below off farm wages we then provide estimates of the lower bounds for preferences for on farm work for males and females which are significant and positive

assessing spillovers from universities to firms evidence from french firm level data we assess the importance of information flows from universities to innovative firms and determine the relative contribution of formal collaboration and pure knowledge spillovers in this process we find that spillovers provide the most benefit to firms that imitate existing technologies or those that are involved in incremental innovation on the other hand highly innovative firms appear to derive most benefit from collaborative research with foreign universities indeed highly innovative firms are at the frontier of the academic knowledge in their industry therefore they only marginally benefit from aggregate or industry wide spillovers they require new forms of academic knowledge that they acquire through formal cooperation with foreign universities

choosing wisely a multibidding approach reaching decisions about the location of noxious facilities such as dump sites environmentally hazardous plants nuclear power generators and the like is a highly contentious issue for instance in february 2000 the u s senate decided that nationwide nuclear waste would be shipped to the yucca mountain site in nevada conditional to it being approved as a high level nuclear waste repository despite the attractive compensation package the state of nevada voiced vehement opposition president clinton vetoed the bill and in may 2000 the senate failed to overturn it as such the major problem facing the u s nuclear industry on where to site a high level radioactive waste repository remains virtually unresolved neither are decisions about the location of desirable events easily solvable every two years the international olympic committee selects hosts for the summer and winter games a procedure that is constantly under review and revision in order to bring about the best possible outcome until about a year ago the decision was made by a vote based on bids and plans submitted by candidate cities however the recent controversy surrounding the choice of salt lake city to host the 2002 winter games culminated in the design of a new procedure for choosing the host of the 2006 winter games this procedure called for the selection of two finalist cities in this case turin and sion immediately after which the host was selected by secret ballot in this case turin another similar issue is currently the subject of heated debate in spain the spanish government both on the national and local level has recently been discussing various possible projects for transferring water from rivers in the north of spain to the arid southern regions the parties involved have conflicting interests with regard to several aspects of the projects proposed particularly the water rich regions are hesitant to give up parts of their water resources the parties involved have still not agreed upon the choice of a transport mode or the size of the transfer payments that would compensate the localities that are relinquishing part of the water supply these and several other cases belong to a class of problems in which a group of agents has to choose one out of several projects a project is efficient if it maximizes the aggregate welfare of the group members reaching an efficient outcome is trivial when the designer has all the relevant information however it is often the case that the parties concerned possess much more information than the designer hence the designer faces a nontrivial problem if she wishes to optimally choose one of the projects moreover from a normative point of view even if the designer has all the information it is easier to justify the use of a fixed procedure to reach a decision than to modify the procedure for various cases in light of information disclosed or already available to the designer several well known methods are available for the problem of choosing one out of a set of alternatives one class of methods consists of various voting schemes such as majority voting or the borda rule the outcomes generated by these methods need not be efficient due to strategic behavior on the part of the agents another class of methods consists of vickreyclarke groves mechanisms for this class truthtelling is a dominant strategy that always results in the choice of an efficient alternative however these mechanisms are not budgetbalanced and the payments collected from the perez castrillo department of economics code universitat autonoma de barcelona 08193 bellatera barcelona spain wettstein department of economics bengurion university of the negev monaster center for economic research beer sheva 84105 israel we thank herve moulin for his helpful suggestions suresh mutuswami who encouraged us to check for strong nash equilibria and francis bloch mark gradstein moshe justman jordi masso and two anonymous referees for their useful comments perez castrillo gratefully acknowledges financial support from bec2000 0172 and 2000sgr 00054

diseconomies of size with fixed managerial ability managerial ability has important implications for farm growth in this article we first show in a production model that increasing output with a fixed level of managerial ability can lead to a decrease in profits next we discuss the effect that managerial ability has on economies of size in the empirical part economies of size are estimated for a sample of dairy farms using a proxy for managerial ability which is calculated as a technical efficiency index the results show that increasing farm size while holding managerial ability constant can be an important source of diseconomies of size copyright 2003 oxford university press

sectoral patterns of technical change towards a taxonomy and a theory abstract the purpose of the paper is to describe and explain sectoral patterns of technical change as revealed by data on about 2000 significant innovations in britain since 1945 most technological knowledge turns out not to be information that is generally applicable and easily reproducible but specific to firms and applications cumulative in development and varied amongst sectors in source and direction innovating firms principally in electronics and chemicals are relatively big and they develop innovations over a wide range of specific product groups within their principal sector but relatively few outside firms principally in mechanical and instrument engineering are relatively small and specialised and they exist in symbiosis with large firms in scale intensive sectors like metal manufacture and vehicles who make a significant contribution to their own process technology in textile firms on the other hand most process innovations come from suppliers these characteristics and variations can be classified in a three part taxonomy based on firms 1 supplier dominated 2 production intensive 3 science based they can be explained by sources of technology requirements of users and possibilities for appropriation this explanation has implications for our understanding of the sources and directions of technical change firms diversification behaviour the dynamic relationship between technology and industrial structure and the formation of technological skills and advantages at the level of the firm the region and the country

animal health inputs endogenous risk general infrastructure technology adoption and industrialized animal agriculture abstract this paper develops a microeconomic model of concentrated animal feeding operations that admits roles for all of animal health inputs genetic profile choices and the pertaining economic infrastructure the basic model emphasizes how time on feed feed density and biosecurity choices interact as well as how these choices respond to i input prices and ii attributes regarding animal productivity parameters that might be influenced by policy choices such as animal welfare strictures and restraints on use of medication we show that ostensibly substituting inputs in protecting against animal health risks may in fact be complements and that the model s production choices come as a complementary package we then extend the model to endogenize the choice of animal genetics a finding is that innovations in general infrastructure encourage herd owners to choose more feed efficient but less hardy animals higher feed conversion efficiency then induces the use of denser feed rations accelerated finishing and greater levels of biosecurity actions at farm perimeters our theory provides a coherent framework for explaining associations among inputs and outcomes that are linked with confined animal agriculture it also explains how animal protein supply chain technology adoption and performance can differ according to a region s state of infrastructure why responses to a change in infrastructure may be large and why public sector efforts to reduce production risk may beget private sector effort to do so

quasi fixed inputs in u s and japanese manufacturing a generalized leontief restricted cost function approach in this paper a generalized leontief variable cost function is develope d which permits analytical derivation of steady state levels of quasi fixed inputs and capacity output and does not require specification of a numeraire input this framework is then used to evaluate the fa ctor demand patterns of japanese and u s manufacturing based on bot h one quasi fixed capital input and two quasi fixed capital and la bor input specifications and both static and dynamic optimization t he findings provide evidence of considerable flexibility of demand re sponses in japan which may have contributed to japan s relatively st rong economic performance in the volatile 1970s copyright 1988 by mit press

collaborative pre competitive r d and the firm abstract governments in many countries have supported programmes of collaborative pre competitive r d in enabling or generic technologies the paper is based on 6 years of research into theuk alvey advanced information technology it programme augmented by research on the swedish it4 programme our focus is the relationship between pre competitive collaborative r d and wider firm strategies and processes the underlying premises of the paper are that the benefits of pre competitive r d are long term rather than short term systemic rather than discrete and accessible only through analysis of processes rather than by counting outputs or calculating return on investment the research provides insights into the strategies and mechanisms of firms participation modes of collaboration and the process of technology transfer knowledge assimilation and application within a firm

dynamic measures of scope and scale economies an application to german agriculture static concepts of multiproduct economies of scale and scope are extended into a dynamic setting within the cost of adjustment framework important properties of the dynamic measures are developed and the foundations of a dynamic theory of the firm generalizing static neoclassical theory are presented dynamic measures of scope and scale as well as shadow costs are estimated empirically for multiple output multiple input german dairy farms operating under a production quota causes of scope economies are explored and a conceptual model to predict the evolution of the production structure of german farms is formulated

on the nature and magnitude of cost economies in hog production in this article we assess the impact of farm size on production cost and evaluate the marginal costs and margins by considering that input prices may change with the scale of production by using french hog farm data we estimate a system of equations including a feed price function input demand functions and an output supply function based on a technology approximated by a combined generalized leontief quadratic form our results suggest that the marginal costs are over estimated when the adjustment of the feed unit prices to a change in farm size is not controlled for more specifically the cost economies for large farms enjoying the highest profits arise primarily from lower feed prices with technological scale economies having little impact in contrast farms with no hired labor exhibit technological scale economies and reach higher price cost margins compared to larger farms

realizing fair outcomes in minimum cost spanning tree problems through non cooperative mechanisms abstract in the context of minimum cost spanning tree problems we present a bargaining mechanism for connecting all agents to the source and dividing the cost among them the basic idea is very simple we ask each agent the part of the cost he is willing to pay for an arc to be constructed we prove that there exists a unique payoff allocation associated with the subgame perfect nash equilibria of this bargaining mechanism moreover this payoff allocation coincides with the rule defined in bergantinos and vidal puga bergantinos g vidal puga j j 2007a a fair rule in minimum cost spanning tree problems journal of economic theory 137 326 352

a larger slice or a larger pie an empirical investigation of bargaining power in the distribution channel this research aims to provide insights into the determinants of channel profitability and the relative power in the channel by considering consumer demand and the interactions between manufacturers and retailers in an equilibrium model we use the nash bargaining solution to determine wholesale prices and thus how margins are split in the channel equilibrium margins are a function of demand primitives and of retailer and manufacturer bargaining power bargaining power is itself a function of exogenous retail and manufacturer characteristics the parties bargaining positions are determined endogenously from the estimated substitution patterns on the demand side the more they have to lose in a negotiation relative to an outside option the weaker the bargaining position we use the proposed bargaining model to investigate the role of the three main factors that have been blamed for the power shift from manufacturers to retailers in recent years firm size increases store brand introductions and service level differentiation in our empirical analysis of the german market for coffee we find that bargaining power varies among the different manufacturer retailer pairs this result suggests that bargaining power is not an inherent characteristic of a firm but rather depends on the negotiation partner we are able to confirm empirically previous theoretical findings that there can be cases where the slice of the pie that goes to one of the channel members may decrease but the overall pie increases and compensates for the smaller share of profits

the influence of market demand upon innovation a critical review of some recent empirical studies abstract a number of recent empirical studies of technical change at the level of the individual firm have concluded that market demand is the dominant influence upon the innovation process calling forth innovations in market economies the pace of innovation in the private sector heavily influences the growth of national output and productivity and these studies and their conclusions have therefore received much attention having been extensively quoted in discussions of appropriate government policy for the encouragement of innovation this paper reviews a number of these studies and concludes that their findings and the interpretations of their findings in the secondary literature are seriously flawed and in many cases invalid the proposition that market demand governs the innovation process is by no means conclusively demonstrated in these studies and they are therefore inadequate and inappropriate guides for the formulation of policy most of the studies examined employ a working definition of demand factors which is so broad as to embrace a range of possible influences upon innovation which should more properly be classified elsewhere the concept of demand utilized in these studies bears little resemblance to the more restrictive and precise definition of market demand found in economics in addition the phenomena analyzed in these studies are a very heterogeneous lot the studies do not address identical empirical questions and their findings are as a result neither uniform nor unambiguous both demand and supply side influences are crucial to understanding the innovation process and it is the exclusive preoccupation with only one set of these forces which is criticized in this paper some implications of the criticism for government policy toward innovation are discussed in the conclusion

on the sources and significance of interindustry differences in technological opportunities abstract the set of technological opportunities in a given industry is one of the fundamental determinants of technical advance in that line of business we examine the concept of technological opportunity and discuss three categories of sources of those opportunities advances in scientific understanding and technique technological advances originating in other industries and in other private and governmental institutions and feedbacks from an industry s own technological advances data from the yale survey on industrial research and development are used to measure the strength of various sources of technological opportunity and to discern interindustry differences in the importance of these sources we find that interindustry differences in the strength and sources of technological opportunities contribute importantly to explanations of cross industry variation in r d intensity and technological advance

cost monotonicity consistency and minimum cost spanning tree games abstract we propose a new cost allocation rule for minimum cost spanning tree games the new rule is a core selection and also satisfies cost monotonicity we also give characterisation theorems for the new rule as well as the much studied bird allocation we show that the principal difference between these two rules is in terms of their consistency properties

scale economies and inefficiency of u s dairy farms this study employs data drawn from the 2000 agricultural resource management survey a u s department of agriculture sponsored farmers survey the article estimates returns to scale relationships across dairy farms of different sizes and across different regions incorporating variables hypothesized to influence farm performance results point to significant scale economies in u s dairy farms and underscore the importance of taking account of inefficiency when estimating scale economies contrary to previous research the preferred cost function specification does not show a region of decreasing returns to scale this finding helps explain why the average size of dairy farms has been increasing

analysis of environmental efficiency variations a nutrient balance approach recent literature has argued that environmental efficiency ee which is built on the materials balance mb principle is more suitable than other ee measures in situations where the law of mass conversation regulates production processes in addition the mb based ee method is particularly useful in analysing possible trade offs between cost and environmental performance identifying determinants of mb based ee can provide useful information to decision makers but there are very few empirical investigations into this issue this article proposes the use of data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis techniques to analyse variation in mb based ee specifically the article develops a stochastic nutrient frontier and nutrient inefficiency model to analyse determinants of mb based ee the empirical study applies both techniques to investigate mb based ee of 96 rice farms in south korea the size of land fertiliser consumption intensity cost allocative efficiency and the share of owned land out of total land are found to be correlated with mb based ee the results confirm the presence of a trade off between mb based ee and cost allocative efficiency and this finding favouring policy interventions to help farms simultaneously achieve cost efficiency and mp based ee

public financing of cooperative r d projects in spain the concerted projects under the national r d plan abstract this work will analyse the factors which influence decision making within the spanish public sector on the financing of precompetitive research projects developed by firms in collaboration with universities and public research organisms with this objective in mind an econometric model is proposed that explains simultaneously the concession of aid on behalf of the public sector and the amount of such aid the estimates carried out indicate among other results that the destination of the budgeted funds explains a large part of the public financing received however all the evidence would seem to indicate that the funding has not been awarded either in order to significantly favour those firms which most need it nor to give incentive to high levels of cooperation

market and cost structure in the u s beef packing industry a plant level analysis a resurgence of consolidation in the u s meat packing industry in the past few decades has stimulated academic and policy debate issues raised include the role of cost economies in driving these patterns and the effects on the agricultural sector cattle producers from market power here plant level cost and revenue data for u s beef packing plants are used to estimate a cost based model incorporating cattle and output market pricing behavior the robust results indicate little market power exploitation in either the cattle input or beef output markets and that any apparent evidence is counteracted by cost efficiencies such as utilization and scope economies copyright 2001 oxford university press

theoretically sound practically useless government grants for industrial r d in australia abstract for nearly twenty years the australian government has relied on a system of grants to encourage r d activity in firms despite low and declining r d effort in this sector and only equivocal evidence that grants were having the desired effect the board that administers the grants programme has regularly expressed its total confidence in its success indeed the government has long relied on grants as the foundation of its industrial r d policy until recently at the cost of any major alternative programme much of this confidence has been encouraged by the combined influence of market failure theory and faith in the linear model of technological change the first explaining what is wrong rather than how it may be put right and the second imputing a simplicity to the innovative process which suggests that if something is wrong it can be easily and assuredly rectified by stimulating r d

an implementation of the owen value abstract we present an implementation of the owen value owen 1977 essays in mathematical economics and game theory pp 76 88 inspired by the bidding mechanism introduced by perez castrillo and wettstein 2001 j econ theory 100 274 294 the idea is the following first players of each coalition play the bidding mechanism trying to obtain the resources of the coalition later players who obtained the resources play the bidding mechanism in order to share the surplus

can the small dairy farm remain competitive in us agriculture smaller dairy farms in the us are observed to have higher costs than larger farms and whether those higher costs are due to technology or inefficiency has implications for policy to address the small farm if high cost of production on smaller farms is due to a higher cost frontier then to make small farms competitive would require research to devise and design technology that is suitable for small farms if instead high cost is due to inefficiency then educational approaches are needed to ensure small dairy farms use technology efficiently to determine the cause of higher costs on small farms the cost of milk production by farm size was decomposed into frontier and efficiency components with a stochastic cost curve using data on usa dairy farms although the frontier cost of production decreases with farm size that cost reduction is not as pronounced as a cost curve that includes inefficiency the higher cost of production on many smaller farms is caused by inefficiency rather than technology

on the anti competitive effects of quantity discounts abstract we analyze the competitive effects of quantity discounts in an asymmetric duopoly we find that for a sizeable set of parameter values quantity discounts harm the smaller firm and reduce consumers surplus they can even decrease social welfare i e the sum of producers and consumers surpluses however the circumstances in which quantity discounts may decrease social welfare are limited and difficult to identify in practice

the national system of innovation in historical perspective contrary to some recent work on so called globalisation this paper argues that national and regional systems of innovation remain an essential domain of economic analysis their importance derives from the networks of relationships which are necessary for any firm to innovate whilst external international connections are certainly of growing importance the influence of the national education system industrial relations technical and scientific institutions government policies cul tural traditions and many other national institutions is fundamental the historical examples of germany japan and the former ussr illustrate this point as well as the more recent contrast between east asian and latin american countries introduction the national system of friedrich list according to this author s recollections the first person to use the expression national system of innovation was bengt ake lundvall and he is also the editor of a highly original and thought provoking book 1992 on this subject however as he and his colleagues would be the first to agree and as lundvall himself points out the idea actually goes back at least to friedrich list s conception of the national system of political economy 1841 which might just as well have been called the national system of innovation the main concern of list was with the problem of germany overtaking england and for underdeveloped countries as germany then was in relation to england he advocated not only protection of infant industries but a broad range of policies designed to accelerate or to make possible industrialisation and economic growth most of these policies were concerned with learning about new technology and applying it the racialist and colonialist overtones of the book were in strong contrast to the inter nationalist cosmopolitan approach of the classical free trade economists and list s belief that holland and denmark should join the german bund and acquire german nationality because of their descent and whole character reads somewhat strangely in the european community of today nevertheless despite these unattractive features of his outlook he clearly anticipated many contemporary theories after reviewing the changing ideas of economists about development in the years since the second world war the world bank 1991 concludes that it is intangible investment in knowledge accumulation which is decisive rather than physical capital investment as was at one time believed pages 33 35 the report cites the new growth theory

capitalism as an engine of progress economists from marx to schumpeter have touted capitalism as an engine of technical progress but what kind of an engine is it what are its key components how does it work

axiomatization of the shapley value on minimum cost spanning tree games abstract this paper axiomatizes the shapley value on minimum cost spanning tree games by using axioms which are different from those used in network games journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 a14

the social shaping of the national science base abstract innovation studies confirm de tocqueville s prediction that continuous technical change in business firms in modern society would require the development in close proximity of publicly funded basic research and associated training the rate and direction of the development of a country s science base is strongly influenced by its level of economic development and the composition of its economic and social activities in other words it is socially shaped

new technology based firms in innovation networks symplectic and generative impacts abstract the traditional body of research on new technology based firms reflects the linear sequential view of the technological innovation process the modern innovation theory views the innovation process as a complex interative process that is essentially systemic in character the systemic view of the technological innovation process largely remains to be implemented in research on new technology based firms the present study represents an attempt to bridge this gap by applying a systemic approach to research on new technology based firms the empirical part of the present study develops and empirically tests a model that classifies new technology based firms into science based firms and engineering based firms the two categories are defined in terms of the functional relationship between the new technology based firm and the articulation process of basic technologies in the model new technology based firms are analyzed in terms of the systemic knowledge conversion process to which they are attached the model receives support in three empirical databases compiled among new technology based firms in finland the united kingdom and silicon valley the analysis of the silicon valley database is the first ever systematic survey of the spin off firms of stanford university

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

how much do farmers value their independence a farmer s decision to contract or produce independently depends on the distribution of income and the nonpecuniary attributes associated with both business arrangements the benefits to growers from contracting such as risk reduction may be overestimated if the nonpecuniary benefits enjoyed by independent producers such as the right to make management decisions and own the commodity produced are not accounted for this study uses data from a u s national survey of hog producers to estimate 1 the difference in expected net returns between contracting and independent production 2 the premium a representative farmer would pay for the risk reduction provided by a contract and 3 the premium a farmer would pay for the nonpecuniary benefits associated with independent production results indicate that growers have a strong preference for autonomy with moderately risk averse growers being willing to pay more for the attributes of independent production than they would for the risk reducing benefits of a contract

does regulation of manure land application work against agglomeration economies theory and evidence from the french hog sector the well known increase in the geographical concentration of hog production suggests the presence of agglomeration economies related to spatial spillovers and inter dependencies among industries in this paper we examine whether the restrictions on land application of manure may weaken productivity gains arising from the agglomeration process we develop a model of production showing the ambiguous spatial effect of land availability and the restriction on the manure application rate indeed while the regulation of manure application triggers dispersion when manure is applied to land as a crop nutrient it also prompts farmer to adopt manure treatment that favors agglomeration of hog production estimations of a reduced form of the spatial model with a spatial hac procedure applied to data for french hog production for 1988 and 2000 confirm the ambiguous effect of land limitations induced by the restrictions on manure application it does not prevent spatial concentration of hog production and even boosts the role played by spatial spillovers in the agglomeration process

the roles of science in technological innovation abstract one of the central issues in science policy during the past decade has been the extent to which the national levels of expenditure on scientific education and research influence the standard of living this paper provides empirical evidence to show that the pay off from this investment in science is more complex and indirect than previously supposed

asset profiles for technological innovation abstract this paper proposes a conceptual distinction between four generic categories of assets for technological innovation 1 scientific research assets 2 process innovative assets 3 product innovative application assets and 4 aesthetic design assets technological innovation may sometimes require the activation of only one asset type but more often a specific constellation of more asset types has to be mobilized the asset categories differ profoundly with respect not only to their respective competence bases but also with respect to their functional contribution to industrial innovation and mostly also to their organizational attachment this way of conceiving technological innovation is opposed to the one dimensional r d conception that tends to view r d as one functional asset along with others like manufacturing or marketing it is argued that the different innovative assets are often located in different organizational settings within the corporation the coupling between assets is discussed in terms of inter asset specificity we illustrate the great variation of innovative asset profiles across a wide spectrum of product categories the concept of technological trajectories is reinterpreted in terms of asset profile oscillations and regroupings finally the framework is related to recent efforts to formulate a resource based theory of the firm and the implications for innovation strategy is discussed

biosecurity bioterrorism and the governance of science the increasing convergence of science and security policy science and security policy are increasingly overlapping because of concerns that legitimate research might be misapplied to develop biological weapons this has led to an expansion of security policy to cover broad areas of research and scientific practice including funding publishing peer review employment materials transfer post graduate teaching and academics ability to design and perform experiments and disseminate research such changes raise policy concerns because many of the technologies used to produce biological weapons are dual use and have legitimate peaceful applications as a result attempts to control their generation diffusion or application can have unintended impacts on socially beneficial applications this paper explores recent changes in the governance of science and technology and contributes to future policy making by assessing the relative merits of understanding the development of dual use policy in terms of either technology transfer or technology convergence 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

minimum cost arborescences in this paper we analyze the cost allocation problem when a group of agents or nodes have to be connected to a source and where the cost matrix describing the cost of connecting each pair of agents is not necessarily symmetric thus extending the well studied problem of minimum cost spanning tree games where the costs are assumed to be symmetric the focus is on rules which satisfy axioms representing incentive and fairness properties we show that while some results are similar there are also signifcant differences between the frameworks corresponding to symmetric and asymmetric cost matrices

short run returns to scale farm size and economic efficiency this paper analyzes the effects of returns to scale farm size technical allocative and scale inefficiencies on the profitability of utah dairy farms it derives the conditions necessary to compare the profitability of farms within and between different size classifications as small medium and large some comparative static results regarding increases in input prices and a decrease or withdrawal of price support on profitability of small medium and large farms are presented copyright 1993 by mit press