an energy efficient future a strategy for the uk abstract this article examines the national and international energy context within which a uk energy efficiency strategy would need to be formulated and also highlights the broader macroeconomic rationale for a more concerted approach it focuses particular attention upon the crucial role of the public sector including both the energy demand and supply sides and the need to review investment appraisal criteria in the energy sector

all pay war we study a model of conflicts and wars in which the outcome is uncertain not because of luck on the battlefield as in standard models but because countries lack information about their opponent in this model expected resource levels and production and military technologies are common knowledge but realized resource levels are private information each country decides how to allocate its resources to production and warfare the country with the stronger military wins and receives aggregate production in equilibrium both comparative and absolute advantages matter a larger resource share is allocated to warfare by the country with a comparative advantage in warfare at relatively low realized resource levels and by the country with an absolute disadvantage in warfare at relatively high realized resource levels from an ex ante perspective the country with a comparative advantage in warfare is more likely to win the war unless its military potential is much lower

the privatization of electricity distribution in turkey a legal and economic analysis this paper analyzes the recent regulatory reform in the turkish electricity distribution market from a legal and economic perspective we highlight tensions between the judiciary politicians and bureaucracy and discuss their economic consequences the paper engages in a discussion of economic consequences of legal procedures we stress interactions between legal decisions and economic institutions the historical positions of the constitutional court and danistay council of state on privatizations have been ambivalent and it is hard to qualify them as an incentive for privatization and reform despite some recent liberal decisions we address reasons behind their decisions and offer some suggestions toward improving the privatization process

value creation management competencies and global corporate citizenship an ordonomic approach to business ethics in the age of globalization this article develops an ordonomic approach to business ethics in the age of globalization through the use of a three tiered conceptual framework that distinguishes between the basic game of antagonistic social cooperation the meta game of rule setting and the meta meta game of rule finding discourse we address three questions the answers to which we believe are crucial to fostering effective business leadership and corporate social responsibility first the purpose of business in society is value creation companies have a social mandate to organize mutually advantageous cooperation second business ethics should teach the management competencies necessary to fulfill business s societal mandate these competencies are optimization competence in the basic game of value creation governance competence in the meta game of political rule setting and the three discourse related skills of orientation competence reception competence and communication competence necessary for engaging in the meta meta game third companies can help solve global problems through global corporate citizenship if they participate as political and moral actors in rule setting processes and rule finding discourse aimed at laying the foundation for value creation on a global scale

the specification of the probability functions in tullock s rent seeking contest abstract in his model of a rent seeking contest tullock g 1980 efficient rent seeking in buchanan j m tollison r d tullock g eds toward a theory of the rent seeking society texas a and m university press college station pp 97 112 uses a simple concrete specification for the probability functions which determine the probability that a player wins the contest given the bids made by the players we discuss in general terms a set of conditions that can be imposed on probability functions in this game next we show that the specification chosen by tullock is the unique one that satisfies these conditions

toward a public choice theory of monopoly regulation its many dimensions from the perspective of market economics this new thrust was consolidated in 1976 by s peltzman who developed a formal market model in which regulations were viewed as commodities brokered via political markets in response to bids and counter bids by those who stood to gain or to lose from specific regulation outcomes the subsequent contribution by becker 1983 added insights and institutional flesh to the stigler peltzman embryo confirming regulation as an integral component of mainstream market economics an important implication of such contributions especially those from the chicago perspective is that regulation for the most part confirms resource efficiency within market process that political markets in the absence of entry barriers are just as effective as are competitive commodity markets in achieving economic efficiency defined within a comparative institutions framework nowhere is this complacency more apparent than in the conclusion drawn by becker 1983 from a detailed formal analysis of competition among pressure groups for political influence

a multi winner nested rent seeking contest this paper considers a symmetric imperfectly discriminating rent seeking contest in which there may be several winners we first demonstrate a serious flaw in previous work and then go on to suggest an alternative method for analyzing the contest in contrast to the previous work we show that the value of the rent is fully dissipated in equilibrium as the number of players becomes large

bad loans to good friends money politics and the developmental state in south korea why has the literature on asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in south korea how can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in south korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999 politics is central to the answer in this study i make two arguments first money politics was extensive in south korea both during and after the high growth era second political not economic considerations dominated policymaking this study explains both past and present and compares the patterns of money politics in the early post independence era with those that arose after the democratic transition in 1987 while during the park era a balance of power between businessmen and politicians kept corruption from spinning out of control the transition to democracy altered the basic business state relationship allowing business to exert greater influence over policy decisions the political hypothesis advanced in this study suggests a new direction for our research about the developmental state

potential impacts of electricity price changes on price formation in the economy a social accounting matrix price modeling analysis for turkey recent reforms in the turkish electricity sector since 2001 aim to introduce a tariff system that reflects costs this is expected to affect the production and consumer prices of electricity the changes in electricity prices are then reflected in production costs in other segments of the economy subsequently producer and consumer prices will be affected the potential impact of the changes in electricity prices that the ongoing electricity reforms in turkey will bring about may have important implications on the price formation in economic activities and the cost of living for households this paper evaluates the potential impacts of changes in electricity prices from a social accounting matrix sam price modeling perspective it is found that based on the estimated price multipliers that prices in the energy producing sectors mining and iron and steel manufacturing sectors would be affected more severely than the remaining sectors of the economy consumer prices are affected slightly less than producer prices

an evaluation of the transitional turkish electricity balancing and settlement market lessons for the future balancing and settlement market is a crucial part of restructured turkish electricity market in this framework the main purpose of this study is to examine whether the prices constituted in the transitional balancing and settlement market reflect the real cost of imbalances although it is observed that the prices are not powerful in indicating the real cost of imbalances turkey has the opportunity to form a well functioning market within the context of planned new market structure turkey needs to define a proper roadmap reckoning the points mentioned in this paper to be able to achieve her objectives

rent dissipation through electricity prices of publicly owned utilities a public choice model is presented in order to explain the fact that publicly owned electricity utilities rarely price at marginal cost in practice it is shown that if i government revenues are raised through proportional taxes ii median income is less than mean income and iii the share of a consumer s spending on electricity decreases with income then the price resulting from a majority rule and universal voting is below marginal cost the determination of a fixed subscription fee is also considered empirical evidence of our results is obtained from pricing and consumption data for hydro qu6bec

property rights to multi attribute fishery resources abstract the united nations code of conduct for responsible fisheries urges governments to manage multiple yield bycatch and habitat attributes of fishery resources the information and enforcement costs of multi attribute management are high however as a result relatively few attributes generally stock biomass age structure and growth are specified in yield targets exposing others e g localized abundance sex to excessive use in the public domain spillovers caused by fishing gear e g gear conflicts bycatch habitat damage generally are regulated with catch limits and area closures that artificially divide or exclude activities which interact due to attribute jointness total fishery income is compromised because tradeoffs are not evaluated at the margin alternative arrangements that bundle fishery resource attributes are suggested bundled property rights could evolve from a comprehensive assignment of usufruct rights which reduce the transaction costs of gathering information on unspecified attributes and of contracting for spillovers markets for harvest rights could resolve the simpler gear conflict and bycatch problems other interactions e g predation habitat requirements would require corporate or collective property rights and governance arrangements that make harvesters and other interested parties the residual claimants of their harvest decisions subject to government restrictions that protect public goods

exploring the options for carbon dioxide mitigation in turkish electric power industry system dynamics approach electric power industry has a huge carbon mitigation potential fundamentally because there are large carbon free renewable resource options in turkey with growing demand in electricity consumption and incentives offered for natural gas fired electricity generation co2 emissions sourced from electric power industry had tripled over the last two decades current governmental strategy focuses on energy security and resource diversity in a growing economy and does not articulate sufficient mitigation targets and appropriate regulations in this research an original dynamic simulation model is built validated and analyzed to explore the options for carbon mitigation in turkish electric power industry model structure represents the investment dispatch and pricing heuristics as well as the natural resource base of electricity generation in turkey it operates on annual basis over 30 years to simulate installed capacities and generations of power plants with alternative resources and their resulting co2 emissions the analysis presented in this paper reveals that there are mitigation options below 50 of business as usual growth with common policy options such as feed in tariffs investment subsidies and carbon taxes the model can serve as an experimental platform for further analysis of problems related to carbon mitigation in turkish electricity sector

gordon tullock and experimental economics gordon tullock s research has substantially influenced the development of economic science in general and experimental economics in particular we present the first comprehensive survey of this significant achievement we show how tullock s research in bioeconomics influenced later developments in neuroeconomics and how his pioneering work on rent seeking generated a literature of laboratory tests of his hypothesis we also describe tullock s own experiments and draw attention to his early insights on trust games

a dynamic model of conflict and appropriation abstract this paper presents an extension of a static model of economic conflict analyzed by hirshleifer 1991 1995 and skaperdas 1992 to an infinite horizon differential game our aim is to highlight the strategic role of appropriation among a smaller group of agents in an intertemporal context the model yields the conclusion that there exists a unique linear nonlinear markov perfect equilibrium strategy even when strategies are defined over the entire state space we demonstrate that partial cooperation can be seen as a long run response to conflict moreover a decrease in the effectiveness of appropriation the depreciation rate of a common pool stock the rate of time preferences or an increase in the degree of noise improves the degree of partial cooperation and thus welfare in an anarchic society

the eoq with backlogging derived without derivatives abstract in previous work the eoq formula without consideration to backlogging has been given a derivation without reference to the use of derivatives neither for necessary conditions nor for second order sufficient conditions furthermore this algebraic derivation immediately provided the value of the average cost function in optimum this paper extends the previous result to the eoq formula taking the backlogging case into consideration it is shown that a similar derivation immediately provides the corresponding results for this case

aggregate comparative statics abstract in aggregative games each player s payoff depends on her own actions and an aggregate of the actions of all the players many common games in industrial organization political economy public economics and macroeconomics can be cast as aggregative games this paper provides a general and tractable framework for comparative static results in aggregative games we focus on two classes of games 1 aggregative games with strategic substitutes and 2 nice aggregative games where payoff functions are continuous and concave in own strategies we provide simple sufficient conditions under which positive shocks to individual players increase their own actions and have monotone effects on the aggregate the results are illustrated with applications to public good provision contests cournot competition and technology choices in oligopoly

rent seeking at 52 an introduction to a special issue of public choice a half century after he developed it gordon tullock s idea of rent seeking is more relevant than ever though the concept has gained widespread acceptance among academics it has yet to make an impression on public discourse but with favoritism corruption and the power of special interests in the headlines the idea deserves broader attention in this special issue of public choice we commemorate tullock s insight contributors examine the making of this classic piece and its effect on economic theory empirical analysis and economic teaching original papers also develop new insights into questions of development the control of violence corruption culture equity regulation rent extraction the political coase theorem and more

rent seeking and market structure comment if the firms in an industry are to be successful in raising money to influence government two conditions must be met 1 there must be sufficient rents available from government decisions regarding that industry to make such expenditures worthwhile and 2 the industry must be sufficiently concentrated to avoid a free rider problem in fund raising this argument though seemingly intuitively appealing has been under recent empirical attack this paper seeks to restore the parapets

information communication technology and electricity consumption in emerging economies abstract this study examines the impact of information communication technology ict on electricity consumption in emerging economies the empirical results obtained from dynamic panel demand models show a positive and statistically significant relationship between ict and electricity consumption when ict is measured using internet connections mobile phones or the number of pcs long run ict elasticities are smaller than income elasticities but because ict growth rates are so much higher than income growth rates the impact of ict on electricity demand is greater than the impact of income on electricity demand one implication of these results is that policies designed to close the digital divide between developed and developing economics by increasing the adoption of ict in developing countries are put at odds with energy policies to reduce ghg emissions

analysing success of regulatory policy transfers evidence from turkish energy markets abstract economic regulation of public utilities has become a worldwide phenomenon with the preceding privatisation stream it is questionable to transfer regulatory models hastily without customising the policy options or introducing necessary institutional reforms enabling the achievement of expected results of regulatory reform institutional configuration of a country affects credibility of regulatory commitments quality of regulatory design and way of policy transfer turkey s energy market regulation experience confirms the decisive role of institutions in shaping the regulatory framework

rent seeking in a market with morality solving a puzzle about corporate social responsibility rent seeking by lobbying for government favors is generally thought to be wasteful in view of this wastefulness it is puzzling that rent seeking by corporations has not been criticized as a failure to be socially responsible or even as an unethical business practice this article examines the compatibility of rent seeking with corporate social responsibility by utilizing thomas dunfee s idea of a marketplace with morality this idea is useful for solving this puzzle because in considering whether rent seeking is compatible with corporate social responsibility it is necessary first to define rent seeking which this article argues is a normative concept and second to find some principled way of identifying rent seeking behavior it also solves the puzzle about rent seeking by revealing that the concept of rent seeking itself is of little use in determining whether certain conduct is or is not socially responsible since rent seeking activity cannot be identified without first evaluating which activity is rent seeking

economists and public policy chicago political economy versus conventional views both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process in improving the decision making process in sharp contrast information and incentive problems related to voting rules the bureaucracy and the legislature do not arise in cpe because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups consequently the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies that is the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so but as mitchell 1989 290 stresses the important unanswered question in cpe remains if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur

the industrial structure of the california assembly committee assignments economic interests and campaign contributions this paper examines the provision of campaign contributions made by economic interests to incumbents seeking reelection in the 1984 1986 and 1988 california assembly elections the study tests whether the distribution of campaign contributions by specific industrial sectors corresponds to legislator possession of the policy property rights associated with membership on relevant assembly standing committees a non parametric statistical model compares the distribution of campaign contributions from groups within a given industrial sector to members of relevant policy committees with the distribution of contributions from all other contributor classes the empirical analysis confirms that committee assignments significantly affect the allocation of special interest resources in assembly elections substantiating the importance of institutional considerations in influencing special interest activity

can law impose competition a critical discussion and evidence from the turkish electricity generation market electricity markets have undergone regulatory reforms since the early 1980s around the world technical analyses of these reforms usually pay lip service to the influence of politics over regulatory processes existing studies examine certain aspects of the market such as demand pricing and efficiency and they touch upon political issues only passingly when economic models cannot provide sufficient explanation this approach problematically takes politics as an ad hoc variable this study shows that electricity is intrinsically a political good and argues that any meaningful reform effort should take institutions as the starting point rather than a residual the argument that politics has to be an endogenous variable in any model aspiring to explain behavior in electricity markets is demonstrated in the paper the evidence for the political good character of electricity is found by examining the turkish regulatory reform for which it is argued that there is not a satisfactory relationship between expected and realized gains

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

ideological conviction and persuasion in the rent seeking society abstract the paper develops a model of rent seeking in a democratic political context where voting as well as rent seeking matters in this context the paper demonstrates that voter ideology is a constraint on the rent seeking game as well as a possible avenue of rent seeking in a setting where there are both rent seeking and ideological interest groups rent seekers can free ride on the efforts of ideologues which tends to reduce rent seeking effort in a setting where complementary economic and ideological interest groups coordinate their efforts both rent seeking and ideological conflict tend to increase

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

electricity restructuring in turkey abstract turkey implemented the electricity sector reform by which the electricity market law no 4628 passed in february 2001 recently all segments of the turkish electricity sector are dominated by a vertically integrated public owned monopoly turkiye elektrik kurumu the turkish electricity institution the turkish electricity reform involves vertical deintegration of generation transmission and distribution introduction of competition into generation and retail sale establishment of an independent regulatory authority and privatization of public generation and distribution entities this article provides an overview of the turkish electricity sector reform and defines some problems that may affect the reform success

participation in deterministic contests abstract this paper considers participation in deterministic contests for m 1 identical prizes which employ an auction like rule to determine the winners in most papers that investigate such models participation by precisely m 1 players is associated with players having complete information about their opponents characteristics and participation by more than m 1 players is associated with players having incomplete information about their opponents characteristics i show that incomplete information is in fact neither sufficient nor necessary for participation by more than m 1 players

rent seeking with regretful agents theory and experiment abstract we investigate both theoretically and experimentally the role that information disclosure has on behavior in all pay environments in which all agents must exert costly effort but only the winner is rewarded through the lens of all pay auctions we show that bidders who have regret concerns when they lose an auction may alter their bids whether or not information about the winning bid is disclosed all losing bidders regret not bidding 0 however when feedback on the winning bid is provided those bidders who lost at an affordable price may regret not bidding more we show that the former effect causes bidders to lower their bids while the latter effect causes bidders to raise their bids our experimental results indicate overbidding whether or not the winning bid is disclosed to losing bidders however disclosing the winning bid leads to even more aggressive bidding increases revenues decreases the frequency of dropouts and also leads to more efficient allocations thus our results show that information disclosure is a powerful tool that mechanism designers may wish to exploit to extract more rents in all pay environments

the reform in the turkish natural gas market a critical evaluation turkey is in a strategically advantageous position in terms of its natural gas market being in the middle of europe and energy rich countries of central asia it can be an energy corridor between these two regions it can import gas from a number of countries and diversify its sources this situation may also provide motivation for a competitive gas market the recent reform in the market which began in 2001 was an attempt to strengthen the natural gas market to this end however the reform has not worked out as expected so far this article discusses recent restructuring efforts in the turkish natural gas market we focus on the legal structure and economic consequences of the legal change within the international economic relations after presenting a detailed discussion of the legal framework we draw attention to the problems of the industry and difficulties in the transition to a more competitive market structure in the end we touch upon some regulatory issues and potential conflicts

regulatory reform in turkish energy industry an analysis the republic of turkey has initiated an ambitious reform program in the most important segments of her energy market which requires privatization liberalization as well as a radical restructuring of these industries however there is no consensus that the measures introduced are optimal the present article attempts first to evaluate the regulatory framework created by the laws of 2001 in terms of economic efficiency considerations and second to determine what still needs to be done to improve the current situation the paper not only provides an analysis of these reforms but also lists some policy suggestions the study concludes that despite relatively good legislative framework in practice the reforms in turkey are far from ideal as they are mainly in the form of textbook reforms and therefore a significant amount of work still lies ahead of turkey to set up a fully fledged energy market

an operational policy for a three stage distributive supply chain system with retailers backorders abstract this research deals with a production inventory problem consisting of three stage tree type single producer multi distributor and multi retailer supply chain network where a model has been developed for achieving the lowest total cost for operating a supply chain system with allowable shortage in this research the shortage is assumed to occur in a form of backorder the refrigerator manufacturing can suitably be used to illustrate the scenario which makes the situation more rational and realistic by assumptions the customers will not go somewhere else the cost of lost sale is not included in this case the total cost of this tree type distributive supply chain system is comprised of setup costs and holding costs at all echelons and the backorder cost at retailer level only a replenishment policy is sought to operate the system at a minimum cost the problem is formulated as an unconstrained mixed integer programming problem and a newly developed doubly hybrid meta heuristic algorithm is adopted as the solution procedure the solutions which determine the desired replenishment policy for the producer distributors and retailers are obtained to minimize the total system cost a sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the outcome of the proposed solution procedure presented in this research numerical results are generated to demonstrate the solution procedure and future research is indicated for further study

political institutions of electricity regulation the case of turkey abstract turkey has been going through a liberalization process in its electricity market over the last decade so far the regulatory content of the market reforms has been in the center of attention in the literature to the negligence of regulatory governance however recent studies which applied the theoretical insights of new institutional economics to utilities regulation have demonstrated that political endowments of the country draw the boundaries to which extent such regulatory content can be effectively implemented in line with these studies this paper adopts an institutional approach and attempts to identify the political endowments of turkey in order to further analyze whether the market reforms succeeded in bringing about sufficient checks to cure the institutional problems in other words the paper takes a picture of the overall regulatory arena the results show that the current regulatory structure especially government regulator relations yet fails to meet good regulatory governance criteria the paper also provides some policy suggestions

illegal markets and the social costs of rent seeking this paper argues that making goods or services illegal results in an increase in the social costs associated with rent seeking the increased social cost is in the form of negative externalities that result from market participants use of coercion and violence in attempts to control trade in the illegal good consequently the social costs of rent seeking will exceed the value of resources dissipated in rent seeking competition and where the external costs exceed the undissipated portion of the tullock cost the social cost of rent seeking is greater than the sum of tullock and harberger costs

electricity demand of manufacturing sector in turkey a translog cost approach abstract this paper models factor demand for manufacturing sector in turkey we estimated a translog cost function with four factor consist of capital labor intermediate input and electricity over the 1980 2001 our objective taking in the consideration electricity as production input was twofold on the one hand to estimate the price elasticity of electricity demand in manufacturing sector and on the other hand to use cross price and morishima elasticities of substitution results for structural analysis regarding effects of electricity liberalization which initiated in 2001 empirical result shows that electricity demand is relatively price sensitive 0 85 our result in terms of electricity price is consistent with the previous studies while electricity labor and electricity capital inputs are complementary results indicate the existence of substitution possibilities between electricity and intermediate input this means that changes in electricity prices have impact on labor demand and investment demand these results have important implications for public policy

reexamining efficient rent seeking in laboratory markets given millner and pratt s 1989 finding of behavior inconsistent with theory we reexamine efficient rent seeking in experimental markets we show that a when r 3 no nash equilibrium exists and therefore behavior has no theoretical benchmark to judge consistency and b when r 1 with a new experimental design utilizing an explicit expected payoff matrix rent seeking behavior is consistent with both nash equilibrium and dissipation hypotheses

decision by sortition a means to reduce rent seeking this essay gives an overview of how arandomized decision mechanism sortition can be expected to reduce the intensity ofself interested activity by rent seekingfactions within democracies the socialcosts of rent seeking are briefly reviewed i then make the case that randomization ofcollective decision making proceduresattenuates rent seeking expenditures iillustrate the argument by reference to thehighly contested presidential election of2000 finally i buttress that argument bycomparing plurality voting and sortitionwithin the context of tullock s efficient rent seeking model 1980

the politics of regulation in the turkish electricity market abstract turkey began reforming the electricity market in 2001 the regulatory reform aimed to liberalize the market however the institutional and political structure was not ready for creating an efficiently working competition the independent regulator did not have both experience and will to direct the industry to a more competitive environment currently the reform has slowed down and political preferences drive the industry this paper studies the reasons for the slowdown in the reform efforts by focusing on the relationships between the government judiciary and the independent regulator we conclude that strategic behaviors of players in the market including the judiciary the government and the regulator have made the introduction of competition to the market more costly

information technology and the use of energy abstract this paper assesses the potential impact of information technology on energy use in advanced economies irrespective of energy price movements information technology is expected to raise the energy efficiency of economic activity through its direct application to reducing energy consumption in products and processes and through the productivity improvements and structural changes it initiates which will not involve substantial increases in energy use economic growth will thus be less tied dynamically to the expansion of energy supply and demand than in previous phases of industrialization while overall energy demand may not rise strongly information technology will however tend to increase electricity s importance in the economy

a one vendor multi buyer integrated inventory model abstract we consider a one vendor multi buyer integrated inventory model the vendor seeks to minimize his total annual cost subject to the maximum costs which buyers are prepared to incur in order to implement this model the vendor only needs to know buyer s annual demand and previous order frequency which can be inferred from buyer s past ordering behavior we find the optimal solution for the one vendor one buyer case and present a heuristic approach for the one vendor multi buyer case

on the electricity shortage price and electricity theft nexus abstract pakistan is facing severe electricity shortfall of its history since 2006 several measures have been implemented in order to mitigate electricity shortage the focus has been on raising the installed capacity of electricity generation and transmission the present policy results in expensive thermal electricity generation mostly using expensive and environmentally hazardous furnace oil and inability of utilities to recover their cost of supply although there is unprecedented rise in electricity tariffs this study concentrates on the electricity demand and traces the relationship between electricity shortfalls tariff rate and electricity theft in the background of recent electricity crisis using the data for the period 1985 2010 we employed the granger causality test through error correction model and out of sample causality through variance decomposition method empirical evidence shows that electricity theft greatly influences electricity shortfalls through lowering investment and inefficient use of electricity the study concludes that electricity crisis cannot be handled without combating rampant electricity theft in the country

optimal production and shipment models for a single vendor single buyer integrated system abstract this paper develops a more general production inventory model for a single vendor single buyer integrated system unlike the hitherto existing production inventory models for the vendor buyer system the present model neither requires the buyer s unit holding cost greater than the vendor s nor assumes the structure of shipment policy secondly the model is extended to the situation with shortages permitted based on shortages being allowed to occur only for the buyer thirdly the paper also presents a corresponding production inventory model for a deteriorating item for the integrated system the solution procedures are provided for finding the optimal production and shipment policies and illustrated with numerical examples three significant insights are shown 1 no matter whether the buyer s unit holding cost is greater than the vendor s or not the present model always performs best in reducing the average total cost as compared to the hitherto existing models 2 if the buyer s unit holding cost is less than the vendor s the optimal shipment policy for the integrated system will only comprise shipments with successive shipment sizes increasing by a fixed factor it is different from that obtained by hill hill r m 1999 the optimal production and shipment policy for the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem international journal of production research 37 2463 2475 for the opposite case 3 when designing a single vendor single buyer integrated system making the buyer s unit holding cost lower than the vendor s is more beneficial to the system if shortages are not permitted to occur otherwise it just reverses

the optimal and heuristic solutions of a distribution network abstract competitive environment of global networking and customization call for cost reduction in arborescent tree like inventory system one of the keys to cost reduction is the integration of the supply chain much practical research has been done in the area of integrating the inventory system in recent years integration involves the joint decision making among the producer the distributors and the retailers in the supply chain by revising goyal s model an optimal solution is derived in this paper a heuristic solution model is also developed for a producer distributors retailers inventory system using the principle of strategic partnership numerical results indicate the heuristic solution is a good estimation of the optimal solution

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

the design of rent seeking competitions committees preliminary and final contests the paper examines the common practice in multi contest rent seeking competitions where finalists are selected based on rent seekers efforts in a preliminary contest we find that for any single contest design rent seeking expenditures could be reduced by introducing a preliminary contest if the marginal returns to rent seeking effort in the preliminary contest is sufficiently low in addition to other reasons the paper argues that this may explain why such multi contest designs are common we argue that rent seeking expenditure in the preliminary stage represents the cost of reducing the number of contestants we also find that the practice of setting a higher quality standard in the final contest than the quality standard in the preliminary contest reduces rent seeking waste we derive an expression for the optimal number of finalists under certain conditions we find that the optimal number of finalists is directly proportional or equal to the square root of the number of potential contestants finally we show that whether rent seeking expenditures rise or fall when the rent is awarded by a committee instead of a single administrator depends on the sensitivity of the committee relative to that of the single administrator

competitive procurement with corruption we study competitive procurement administered by a corrupt agent who is willing to manipulate his evaluation of contract proposals in exchange for bribes with complete information and no corruption the efficient firm will win the contract for sure if the agent is corrupt and has large manipulation power however bribery makes it costly for the efficient firm to secure a sure win so in equilibrium the efficient firm loses the contract with positive probability the optimal scoring rule for the buyer deemphasizes quality relative to price and does not fully handicap and may even favor the efficient firm

when are stable rights to rents bad stable enforceable property rights over resources normally furthers economic efficiency i argue that stable rights to government created rents and wealth transfers by contrast generate inefficiency secure rights to receive transfers increases rent seekers incentive to make political investments creating new transfers i demonstrate the point using a two period rent seeking game contestable transfers reduce the probability of establishing a transfer program and aggregate rent seeking expenditures strengthening transfer recipients rights increases the difficulty of eliminating a transfer program

structure of public support for national agricultural research systems a political economy perspective abstract this paper initiates development of a set of stylized facts concerning the structure of public support for national agricultural research systems nars within a neoclassical political economy framework the aim is to place public funding of nars in the broader context of the overall level of direct government assistance to agriculture using a newly constructed data set on nars expenditures over the 1970 1985 period we observe a growing disparity in agricultural research intensity ratios which measure the level of public support for nars in relation to agricultural gross domestic production aggdp between low and high income countries this growing disparity appears to be driven by much larger increases in support for agricultural research by high income countries coupled with a significantly slower growth in the size of their agricultural sector despite the propensity of low and middle income countries to increase real support to agricultural research as per capita incomes rise the public agricultural expenditure ratio which measures public expenditures on agriculture relative to the size of the agricultural sector aggdp increases substantially public expenditures on agriculture were indexed on agricultural and non agricultural populations to give a rough indication of the increasing incentives for rural distributional coalitions to seek a redistribution of public expenditures in their favor a relative research expenditure rre ratio is developed which measures the proportion of total public expenditure on agriculture spent on agricultural research it provides an indication of the relative importance given to research on agriculture within the constraints imposed by overall public spending on agriculture in contrast to the agricultural research intensity ratios the rre ratios suggest that agricultural research appears to command as large a share of the public purse devoted to agriculture in low and middle income countries as it does in high income countries expectations derived from the neoclassical political economy literature that research may have fared relatively better in high compared with low income countries were not supported by the data

incentive contracts and elections for politicians with multi task problems abstract we consider a model with a politician facing a multi task problem while in office the reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others we show that a combination of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate this inefficiency the incentive contract does not require direct information about the performance of the politician and is self financing across terms

the joint economic lot size problem a review abstract this article reviews lot size models which focus on coordinated inventory replenishment decisions between buyer and vendor and their impact on the performance of the supply chain these so called joint economic lot size jels models determine order production and shipment quantities from the perspective of the supply chain with the objective of minimizing total system costs this paper first describes the problem studied introduces the methodology of the review and presents a descriptive analysis of the selected papers subsequently papers are categorized and analyzed with respect to their contribution to the coordination of different echelons in the supply chain finally the review highlights gaps in the existing literature and suggests interesting areas for future research

the implementation process of comparable worth winners and losers this paper provides a unique opportunity to observe how a public policy affected the earnings of various interest groups at different stages of implementation specifically we examine how the earnings of women union members and supervisory and professional staff were affected by various proposed and implemented comparable worth pay plans in iowa we find that large relative gains to women in the original proposed plans were reduced as the process evolved as a result some of the original gains to women were redistributed to union members supervisors and professionals

risk aversion heterogeneity and contests we introduce a novel method of modellingcontests that avoids the complexitiesencountered by the best response function approach we analyse contests in which i there are many risk averse players ii attitudes to risk may differ acrossindividuals and iii the technology thattransforms rent seeking effort intoprobability of winning may also differacross individuals we establish that ifevery player has a constant degree ofabsolute risk aversion a uniqueequilibrium exists we also establishcomparative static results and examine howthe level of rent dissipation is affectedby the heterogeneity of attitudes towardsrisk and the precise nature of the technology

improving electricity efficiency in turkey by addressing illegal electricity consumption a governance approach abstract recent reform activities to liberate and privatize the turkish utility energy sector through deregulation have transformed the scope of the historically government owned corporations however during the free market process approach power theft has become an issue that requires national attention this paper examines the current use of two governance tools privatization and regulation and suggests two others to promote a framework of efficient electricity distribution grants and public information the capacity of the tools to provide a solution to power losses is discussed while considering the barrier of political acceptability in regions of the country where pockets of resistance exist

contest efforts in light of behavioural considerations this study shows that distortion of probabilities is a possible reason for rent under dissipation incontests with relatively small number of participants such distortion may also result however inover dissipation of the contested rent focusing on contests with homogeneous contestants and thecommonly studied contest success function our main results clarify under what circumstances i rents are more under dissipated relative to the standard situation where probabilities are notdistorted ii rents are under dissipated yet less intensely relative to the standard situation whereprobabilities are not distorted iii rents are over dissipated and iv the contest does not possess asymmetric interior equilibrium in pure strategies

lottery versus all pay auction models of lobbying i first provide a complete characterization of the unique equilibrium of the lottery game by n lobbyists with asymmetric valuations and then compare the lottery and the all pay auction models of lobbying i show that the exclusion principle discovered by baye kovenock and de vries 1993 for all pay auction does not apply to lottery i also show that the perverse effect that an exogenous cap may increase the total lobbying expenditure in a two bidder all pay auction discovered by che and gale 1998 does not apply to lottery

cost function estimates scale economies and technological progress in the turkish electricity generation sector abstract turkish electricity sector has undergone significant institutional changes since 1984 the recent developments since 2001 including the setting up of a regulatory agency to undertake the regulation of the sector and increasing participation of private investors in the field of electricity generation are of special interest this paper estimates cost functions and investigates the degree of scale economies overinvestment and technological progress in the turkish electricity generation sector for the period 1984 2006 using long run and short run translog cost functions estimations were done for six groups of firms public and private the results indicate existence of scale economies throughout the period of analysis hence declining long run average costs the paper finds empirical support for the averch johnson effect until 2001 i e firms overinvested in an environment where there are excess returns to capital but this effect was reduced largely after 2002 technological progress deteriorated slightly from 1984 1993 to 1994 2001 but improved after 2002 overall the paper found that regulation of the market under the newly established regulating agency after 2002 was effective and there are potential gains from such regulation

the economic production quantity epq with shortage derived algebraically abstract previously in several papers and textbooks the classical economic order quantity eoq and the economic production quantity epq formulas for the shortage case have been derived using differential calculus and solving two simultaneous equations derived from setting the two first partial derivatives to zero with the need to prove optimality conditions with second order derivatives in a previous original piece of work a new approach to find the eoq with backlogging using some slight algebraic developments appeared this paper extends the mentioned algebraic approach to the epq formula taking shortages into consideration within the case of only one backlog cost per unit and time unit the final expressions provide the same formulas that are available in the classic textbooks on inventory theory

distributional coalitions and the politics of economic reform in latin america for much of the discipline of economics a closed economy is seen as the result of efforts of distributional coalitions and rent seekers to maintain sector specific protections accordingly economic liberalization is explained by the policy consistency of uncompromising reform elites students of the politics of economic adjustment in the developing world in turn have argued that reform programs concentrate costs in the present and disperse benefits in the future hence losers are prepared to engage in collective action whereas prospective winners facing uncertainty about payoffs remain disorganized they thus posit the cohesiveness and insularity of policymakers as the main variable for explaining successful reform both economists and political scientists therefore adopt a collective action approach that overlooks how groups organize in support of liberalization in the recent latin american experience however these reforms have preserved market reserves for firms that provided vital political support to and often colluded with policymaking elites this setting has thus reproduced incentives for rent seeking behavior even in the presence of comprehensive liberalization this evidence supports two interrelated theoretical claims first distributional coalitions may proliferate when the state withdraws from the economy not only when it intervenes second interest based variables retain explanatory power in political economy which state autonomy arguments disregard irrespective of whether the economy is closed or open which neoclassical perspectives overlook to highlight the centrality of interest groups favoring marketization therefore the article suggests modifications to the dominant theories of collective action and the literature on the politics of economic adjustment

cultural institutions and value formation on the art market a rent seeking approach the formation of value in the artistic market can be specifically affected by the behavior of cultural institutions acting on it as monopolistic quality certifiers the rent maximizing strategy limits quantities to sub optimum levels and keeps prices and costs higher this can be worsened by institutional rent seeking the establishment s strategies cannot always be matched through public policies because this can result in an increase of monopoly social losses and of the establishment s lobbying efforts

institutions and commitment the thrust of this paper is that to understand the roles institutions play in society a deep analysis of opportunism and its implications is necessary for that purpose a transactions costs cum positive political theory approach is developed with a focus on the role of institutions and their implications for regulatory commitment a major issue is restraining political opportunism countries that have succeeded in developing a healthy private sector are those that have developed institutions that restrain governmental decision making but such restraining is itself a political choice countries with electoral and legislative systems that bring about decentralized government have stronger chances of developing equilibria where government discretion is restrained copyright 1996 by oxford university press

ambiguous political power and contest efforts when there is incomplete information on the source of power in a contest the contestants may divide their lobbying efforts between the potential centers of power only one of which determines the contests winning probabilities our analysis focuses on the effect of ambiguity regarding the source of power on the contestants aggregate effort in a symmetric simple lottery contest with two potential centers of power specifically we examine the effects of varying the informativeness of the contestants private signals i e the probability that a signal is correct and the degree of correlation between them our benchmark case is the standard tullock s model in which the source of power is known i e the contestants signals are perfectly informative we show that the level of aggregate effort in this case is reached also when the signals are perfectly uninformative however in any intermediate case the contestants aggregate effort is lower provided that the signals are not perfectly correlated in other words there is a u shape relationship between the informativeness of the signals and the aggregate effort in the contest the lowest level of effort is spent when the signals are independent and the probability that a signal is true is about 0 85 in this case efforts are reduced by about one fifth in comparison with the benchmark case from a rent dissipation of 50 to slightly over 40