why do some emerging economies proactively accelerate the adoption of renewable energy abstract this article analyses the determinants of renewable energy consumption in a panel of six major emerging economies namely brazil china india indonesia philippines and turkey that are proactively accelerating the adoption of renewable energy using fully modified ordinary least square fmols dynamic ordinary least square dols and granger causality methods this paper finds that in the long run renewable energy consumption is significantly determined by income and pollutant emission in brazil china india and indonesia while mainly by income in philippines and turkey causal link between renewable energy and income and between renewable energy and pollutant emission are found to be bidirectional in the short run these results suggest that the appropriateness of the efforts undertaken by emerging countries to reduce the carbon intensity by increasing the energy efficiency and substantially increasing the share of renewable in the overall energy mix

monotone comparative statics in games with non monotonic best replies contests and cournot oligopoly abstract in this paper we employ lattice theoretic techniques to derive a number of comparative statics in a logit contest a class of games for which best replies are generically non monotonic using the same approach we obtain several comparative statics in a cournot oligopoly model without imposing the usual assumptions that ensure the game is one of strategic substitutes our analysis illustrates how lattice theoretic techniques can deliver powerful insights in games with non monotonic best replies

technological progress and optimal factor demand abstract this paper analyzes the employment and investment demands of the competitive firm when technological progress embodied in new investment goods is a source of productivity improvements it is shown that technological progress reduces the implicit cost of capital services as well as its sensitivity to variations in the price system several versions of lechatelier s principle are established showing how technological progress modifies the price sensitivity of the factor demands rapid technological progress makes the factor demands less sensitive to price variations however employment demand becomes less more sensitive to interest rate changes when capital and labor are complements substitutes

innovation and employment a reinvestigation using revised pavitt classes the relationship between innovation and employment is addressed in this article through a model and empirical test at industry level for eight european countries in 1994 2004 we investigate this relationship for manufacturing and services and propose a revised pavitt taxonomy covering both of them in order to identify specific patterns of technological change and job creation and loss the contrasting effects of strategies of technological or cost competitiveness are investigated using innovation variables from cis2 and cis3 together with demand wages and industry dynamics they account for changes in employees and hours worked the diversity in these relations across industries is also explored when the model is applied to each revised pavitt class different mechanisms of technological change and effects on jobs emerge

generalized quantity competition for multiple products and loss of efficiency we study a generalized model of quantity cournot oligopolistic competition the impact of competition on social surplus and firms profit is analyzed firms produce multiple differentiated products and face production constraints we compare the social surplus produced by competing firms and by colluding firms with the maximum achievable total surplus in the market similarly we quantify the loss of profit that firms incur by competing instead of colluding our goal is to understand how the presence of competition affects the firms and society as a whole but also to determine what are the key drivers of the inefficiencies that arise due to competition

alternative models of spatial competition the concept of a spatial price equilibrium underlies most studies of spatial movement and competition however this concept is based upon a notion of perfectly competitive markets that is often unrealistic for many markets such as the markets for oil and coal and ignores the existence of local spatial monopolies this paper presents alternative economic models of spatial competition and shows how all of these models can be solved with essentially the same solution algorithm specifically after reformulating the classical spatial price equilibrium model and two extensions of takayama and judge s monopoly model we state and analyze a cournot nash model and discuss solution algorithms we then generalize these models and algorithms to multiple commodities and networks with transshipment nodes we conclude with a brief discussion of possible extensions of this class of models and associated algorithms

efficiency and surplus bounds in cournot competition we derive bounds on the ratios of deadweight loss and consumer surplus to producer surplus under cournot competition to do so we introduce a parameterization of the degree of curvature of market demand using the parallel concepts of concavity and convexity the more concave is demand the larger the share of producer surplus in overall surplus the smaller is consumer surplus relative to producer surplus and the lower the ratio of deadweight loss to producer surplus deadweight loss over total potential surplus is at rst increasing with demand concavity then eventually

mixed oligopoly privatization subsidization and the order of firms moves several types of objectives abstract we show the robustness of results in earlier works for a subsidy in mixed oligopoly these results do not depend upon the fact that each private firm maximizes its own profits

structural change in the uk 1974 84 an input output analysis this paper studies structural change in the uk based on three comparable input output tables structural change is measured by changes in intermediate input flows these may represent either changes is demand or technical and organizational change the focus on intermediate demand offers a different perspective to the more usual approach to measuring structural change which implicitly assumes that the sectoral destination of the output supplied is irrelevant a rich tapestry of results obtained in addtion to the expected effect of an increased pace of change using broad sectoral categories

distributed photovoltaic power generation possibilities benefits and challenges for a widespread application in the mexican residential sector mexico plans to implement a national program to support the adoption of distributed photo voltaic generation dpvg among qualified households the main objectives of such a program would be to reduce the burden of the substantial federal energy subsidy and increase the share of renewable energy sources used to generate electricity in this paper we assess the current conditions under which the mexican residential electricity sector operates and quantify the potential effects that the massive adoption of dpv systems would have on household expenditure and welfare subsidy reduction pollution and water resource usage based on the positive results in terms of both economic and environmental effects our paper provides a significant support for further design and implementation of a dpvg program

willingness to pay for renewable energy primary and discretionary choice of british households for micro generation technologies this paper documents the policy context of renewable energy production in the european union the research adopts a choice experiment approach to investigate households wtp for these renewable energy technologies in the uk the micro generation technologies comprise solar photovoltaic micro wind solar thermal heat pumps and biomass boilers and pellet stoves the study compares the results from conditional and mixed logit models which estimate the distribution of utility coefficients and then derives wtp values as a ratio of the attribute coefficient to the price coefficient with a model in which the wtp distribution is estimated directly from utility in the money space the results suggest that whilst renewable energy adoption is significantly valued by households this value is not sufficiently large for the vast majority of households to cover the higher capital costs of micro generation energy technologies

economic performance and policies for grid connected residential solar photovoltaic systems in brazil abstract we analyze the economic competitiveness of grid connected distributed solar photovoltaic generation through small scale rooftop installations in five brazilian state capitals the locations represent a comprehensive set of the two essential parameters for the economic viability of pv solar irradiation and local electricity tariffs levelized electricity costs lec for pv generation and net present values npv for a specific pv system are presented the analysis comprises three different interest rate scenarios reflecting different conditions for capital acquisition to finance the generators subsidized mature market and country specific risk adjusted interest in the npv analysis revenue flow is modeled by the sale of pv electricity at current residential tariffs assuming net metering using subsidized interest rates the analysis shows that solar pv electricity is already competitive in brazil while in the country specific risk adjusted rate the declining but still high capital costs of pv make it economically unfeasible at a mature market interest rate pv competitiveness is largely dependent on the residential tariff economic competitiveness in this scenario is given for locations with high residential tariffs we demonstrate the high potential of distributed generation with photovoltaic installations in brazil and show that under certain conditions grid connected pv can be economically competitive in a developing country

spatial market policy modeling with goal targets in this paper we show how the theory of variational inequalities can be applied to the formulation qualitative analysis and computation of a new competitive spatial market model in the presence of goal targets the model allows the decision maker to impose supply goals at production locations demand goals at consumption locations and transportation goals between supply and demand locations along with associated penalties for failure to comply this work may be viewed as a contribution to the growing literature on the development of mathematical methodologies for policy modeling

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

a continuous approach to oligopolistic market equilibrium we provide an algorithm for computing cournot nash equilibria in a market that involves finitely many producers the algorithm amounts to following a certain dynamical system all the way to its steady state which happens to be a noncooperative equilibrium the dynamics arise quite naturally as follows let each producer continuously adjust the planned production if desired as a response to the current aggregate supply in doing so the producer is completely guided by myopic profit considerations we show under broad hypothesis that this adjustment process is globally asymptotically convergent to a nash equilibrium

energy populism and household welfare we study a cycle of subsidized energy prices and estimate its welfare impact on households in the buenos aires metropolitan region a simple framework explains its emergence in terms of the preference of a median household voter for receiving transfer gains followed by a future flow of transfer losses we evaluate actual transfers and welfare effects that a departure of prices of natural gas and electricity generation from opportunity costs since 2003 had on households and explore the impact of a way back to opportunity cost pricing

the distributional impact of price changes in hungary and the united kingdom in soviet type economies commodity prices were distorted as part of the redistributive system of the state but with the transition prices have been liberalized and taxes made more uniform has this change adversely affected the distribution of purchasing power this paper develops a new method of measuring the distributional impact of price changes by computing the distributional characteristics of commodities from household budget survey data and applies it to hungary and the united kingdom finding that the distributional impacts over the past decade were negligible and not significantly different from zero in both cases copyright 1995 by royal economic society

technical and economic analysis of domestic high consumption tariff niche market for photovoltaic systems in the mexican household sector abstract this study shows that grid connected photovoltaic systems sfvi are profitable for electricity users falling within the so called domestic high consumption tariff dac these users do not receive any subsidy and make a sfvi feasibly due to the following double mechanism on the one hand the reduced amount of electricity that is drawn from the grid and on the other a re classification which makes them pass from the dac to a lower consumption tariff which benefits from state subsidies it is also shown that the utilisation of sfvi would lead to economic benefits for the electric power sector which in consequence accounts for a social benefit it is estimated that tariff 1 dac users account for a potential sfvi capacity of slightly above 400 mw this capacity may deploy a first significant sfvi market in mexico which so far barely exists and would also represent a reduction in electricity drawn from the grid of nearly 614 gwh per year and reduced co 2eq emissions of 841 thousand tonnes per year finally some recommendations are inferred in order to improve the social benefit of this first deployment of sfvi in the mexican household sector the analysis presented for mexico can be replicated for other countries with subsidised residential tariffs and similar structures such as those countries identified in this paper

on the existence of a unique price equilibrium for models of product differentiation abstract we prove the existence of a unique price equilibrium for models of product differentiation these models are characterized by demand functions that depend on differences in prices and have log increasing differences in own price and other prices which implies that best response correspondences are increasing many discrete choice models satisfy these conditions including logit models and nested logit models and the existence theorem can be applied directly with the logarithmic transformation the existence theorem can be extended to models with homogeneous demand functions which characterizes representative consumer models

market structure and organizational form this paper studies the determinants of a firm s organizational form in the context of an imperfectly competitive industry there are two kinds of organizational forms the multi divisional form m form and the unitary form u form an m form firm suffers from ignorance of demand externalities among different products and double marginalization is eliminated in contrast in a u form firm demand externalities are taken into consideration and double marginalization exists a firm s optimal choice of organizational form depends on the market structure

strategic complements and substitutes and potential games abstract we show that games of strategic complements or substitutes with aggregation are pseudo potential games the upshot is that they possess nash equilibria in pure strategies ne even if the strategy sets are not convex and that various dynamic processes converge to ne in particular ne exist in cournot oligopoly with indivisibilities in production our notion of aggregation is quite general and enables us to take a unified view of several disparate models

the impact of attribute preferences on adoption timing the case of photo voltaic pv solar cells for household electricity generation we are concerned with micro generation individual households generating electricity using a renewable technology we focus on modeling the adoption probability of photo voltaic solar panels by households using data from ontario canada where a generous feed in tariff is available to households generating electricity from solar panels we measure household level preferences for panels and use these preferences along with household characteristics to predict adoption time intentions we use discrete choice experiments to measure household level preferences and establish a causal link between the attributes of the technology and adoption time intentions using discrete time survival mixture analysis significant preferences included lower cost greater energy savings and lower fossil fuel inflation the conditional hazard probability of adoption at a particular time given no previous adoption showed that the attribute preferences had intuitively reasonable effects the hazard probabilities allow us to compute the cumulative probability of adoption over a 10 year period per household technology awareness has a significant effect on the adoption probability reinforcing the need for effective education our approach indicates the level of heterogeneity in preferences particularly high for investment criteria and co2 emissions these findings suggest that education campaigns should explain more about investment criteria feed in tariffs and environmental effects

approaches to economic equilibrium abstract we study mechanisms that help to explain why and how equilibrium may eventually be attained in many economic settings examples include competitive markets and many noncooperative games the main object is an adaptive process reflecting repeated adjustment of individual strategies which under monotonicity conditions leads to equilibrium environmental uncertainty is accommodated but agents need neither know the probability law nor invoke any statistical learning theory nor compute mean values in fact everyone can act perhaps without precedent maybe among strangers within unidentified frames nonetheless we show under reasonable conditions that individual optimality and system equilibrium obtains in the long run

cross licensing and competition we study bilateral cross licensing agreements between n 2 firms that engage in competition after the licensing phase it is shown that the most collusive cross licensing royalty i e the one that allows the industry to achieve the monopoly profit is sustainable as the outcome of bilaterally efficient agreements in a symmetric setting if the terms of the cross licensing agreements are not observable to third parties the monopoly royalty is the unique symmetric bilaterally efficient royalty however when the terms of the agreements are public the most competitive royalty i e zero can also be bilaterally efficient policy implications regarding the antitrust treatment of cross licensing agreements are derived from these results

technical change and full employment the result of a major research project which assesses the effects of technical change on employment levels the structure of employment and the nature of work itself this study concludes that social changes must accompany and even precede technical innovation

iterative computation of cournot equilibrium abstract in a homogeneous coumot model with quasi concave profit functions the problem of determining an equilibrium can be posed as one of solving an equation in one real variable total sales if the response functions are monotone or firms are identical then a certain iterative process based on averaging converges to an equilibrium such iterations have the interpretation that every firm responds to the average of sales by other firms in brevious periods

perfectly competitive markets as the limits of cournot markets a perfectly competitive partial equilibrium market for a single homogeneous good with a bounded continuum of infinitesimal firms is considered cost functions are essentially unrestricted and are allowed to vary smoothly across firms a sequence net of cournot markets each with a finite number of firms which converge smoothly to the perfectly competitive limit in terms of both the inverse demand functions and the distributioon of firm technologies is introduced and it is shown that all markets sufficiently far along the sequence have a cournot equilibrium and all the cournot equilibria converge to the perfectly competitive equilibrium of the limit market

engel curves household characteristics and low user tariff schemes in natural gas abstract we explore the relative importance of income and household characteristics such as family size in explaining differences in household consumption of natural gas and lpg in a simple model of vertically willingness to pay ordered households we posit that the relative importance of the income elasticity of demand vs the family size elasticity depends positively on the price faced by households thus very low prices tend to depress the across households income elasticity of demand relative to the characteristic elasticity and the opposite holds for under high prices we test this hypothesis using for the first time in argentina data from the household expenditure survey on natural gas and lpg and compare the cross consumption equations for both fuels which have quite different price regimes finally we explore welfare implications for low user tariff scheme reforms in natural gas

knowledge is less power experimental evidence from residential energy use abstract imperfect information about product attributes inhibits efficiency in many choice settings but can be overcome by providing simple low cost information we use a randomized control trial to test the effect of high frequency information about residential electricity usage on the price elasticity of demand informed households are three standard deviations more responsive to temporary price increases an effect that is not attributable to price salience conservation extends beyond pricing events in the short and medium run providing evidence of habit formation and implying that the intervention leads to greenhouse gas abatement survey evidence suggests that information facilitates learning jel d12 d83 l11 l94 q41 q54

divisionalization franchising and divestiture incentives in oligopoly a two stage game is used to model firms strategic incentives to divide production among autonomous competing units through divisionalization franchising or divestiture firms simultaneously choose their number of competing units which then engage in cournot competition while it is costly to form autonomous units each firm does so in equilibrium thus reducing firm profits and increasing social welfare relative to the case where firms cannot form competing units with linear demand and costs duopolists choose the socially optimal number of competing units oligopolies with larger numbers of firms choose too many the case of nonlinear demand is also examined copyright 1996 by american economic association

price vs quantity in oligopoly games abstract price setting and quantity setting oligopoly games lead to extremely different outcomes in the market one natural way to address this problem is to formulate a model in which some firms use price while the remaining firms use quantity as their decision variable we introduce a mixed oligopoly game of this type and determine its equilibria in addition we consider an extension of this mixed oligopoly game through which the choice of the decision variables can be endogenized we prove the emergence of the cournot game

research joint ventures and the cost paradox abstract we consider the impact of the cost paradox on the likelihood of cooperative firms to use a cost reducing research joint venture rjv to increase research levels when spillovers are large the cost paradox cp occurs whenever industry wide cost reductions would lead to such intense competition that profits would fall we give a restriction on cost reducing research which guarantees that an rjv will prefer marginal reductions in research to the noncooperative levels whenever cp would arise and spillovers are less than perfect in such cases firms use an rjv to lessen competition rather than to lower costs

welfare optimal patent royalties when imitation is costly we identify welfare optimal patent royalties in a model of costly imitation entry and imperfect competition when the social planner may impose a compulsory license optimal royalties either blockade imitation facilitating unregulated monopoly or yield an aggregate zero profit efficient duopoly when duopoly is optimal the optimal per unit royalty pins the equilibrium price at the aggregate average cost and the optimal fixed royalty shifts surplus so the patentee and imitator break even efficient duopoly yields higher welfare than monopoly for sufficiently low invention cost and may also yield higher welfare than a prize system interestingly royalty payments may be negative because of this efficient duopoly may not be feasible if the planner must instead direct the courts to use such royalties

renewable energy adoption in an ageing population heterogeneity in preferences for micro generation technology adoption abstract many countries are endeavouring to supply more of their energy from renewable resources such countries are also experiencing an aging population with a greater proportion of people aged 65 years this demographic shift may reduce the uptake of renewable energy if older person households are less inclined to accept change and adopt new technologies this paper assesses whether such households have different behavioural responses to energy efficiency compared to the rest of society and investigates whether micro generation renewable energy technologies are less likely to be adopted by these households it uses conditional logit and mixed logit models to investigate the impact of age of household on primary heating adoption and also to assess the impact of older households on the installation of discretionary micro generation technologies solar thermal solar voltaic and wind power to supplement existing heating and lighting systems results indicate that primary heating choice is not affected but that older person households are less inclined to adopt micro generation technologies

residential energy efficient technology adoption energy conservation knowledge and attitudes an analysis of european countries abstract relationships between measures of household energy use behavior and household characteristics are estimated using a unique dataset of approximately 5000 households in 10 eu countries and norway family age composition patterns are found to have a distinct impact on household energy use behavior households with young children are more likely to adopt energy efficient technologies and energy conservation practices and place primary importance on energy savings for environmental reasons by contrast households with a high share of elderly members place more importance on financial savings and have lower levels of technology adoption energy conservation practice use and knowledge about household energy use education levels also matter with higher levels associated with energy efficient technology adoption and energy conservation practice use similarly university education increases the stated importance of energy savings for greenhouse gas reductions and decreases the stated importance for financial reasons education impacts also vary greatly across survey countries and there is some evidence of an eastern western european divide with respect to attitudes towards energy savings these cross country differences highlight the need to balance a common eu energy efficiency policy framework with flexibility for country specific policies to address unique constraints to energy efficient technology and conservation practice adoption

localized technological change and efficiency wages across european regional labour markets antonelli c and quatraro f localized technological change and efficiency wages across european regional labour markets regional studies internal labour markets and industrial relations in continental europe are characterized by substantial rigidity of employed labour engendered by the tight conditions of regional labour markets this rigidity affects both the rate and the direction of technological change the increase of wages induces the localized introduction of biased technological change with clear effects on productivity levels the empirical evidence across a sample of european regions confirms the significant role of the changes in wages both on the increase of the output elasticity of labour and on multifactor productivity

endogenous timing in the presence of non monotonicities the aim of this paper is to generalize the endogenous timing game proposed by hamilton and slutsky games and economic behavior 1990 2 pp 29 46 by allowing the payoff or the marginal payoff of a player to become non monotonic with respect to the strategy of the opponent we propose a taxonomy of the subgame perfect nash equilibria based on the characteristics of the payoff functions proposed by eaton canadian journal of economics 2004 37 pp 805 29 we determine under which conditions of the initial payoff functions commitment has a social value and when the simultaneous move nash equilibrium is commitment robust and discuss its pareto efficiency

supermodularity and complementarity in economics an elementary survey the literature on supermodular optimization and games is surveyed from the perspective of potential users in economics this methodology provides a new approach for comparative statics based only on critical assumptions and allows a general analysis of games with strategic complementarities the results are presented in a simplified yet rigourous manner without reference to lattice theory for the special case of one dimensional parameter and actions sets with the emphasis being on wide accessibility detailed applications are presented for well known models of consumer behavior monopoly pass through bertrand and cournot competition strategic r d search and matching wherever appropriate useful tricks for applications and comparative comments are inserted

cournot and the oligopoly problem cournot s recherches sw les principes mathpmatiques de la thiorie des richesses 1838 contribution to economic theory ranges from the formulation of the concept of demand function to the analysis of price determination in different market structures from monopoly to perfect competition he is credited for being the pioneer in the use of mathematics in economic analysis nevertheless cournot is most known for his theory of oligopoly cournot claimed that prices would also be determined under oligopolistic rivalry he envisioned firms the celebrated mineral water producers competing independently deciding about their production levels and bringing to the market the output where a price emerges from the interaction of supply and demand an equilibrium is reached when the output of any firm is a best response to the other firms outputs that is when each firm chooses an output level that maximizes profits given the outputs chosen by the rivals the equilibrium involves a price above the marginal cost of production cournot thought furthermore that this equilibrium would be stable in the sense that a departure from it would be self correcting through a series of reactions of the firms the disequilibrium dynamics would be governed by the best response functions of the firms that is by the functions that give the optimal output of a firm in terms of the outputs of the rivals cournot also evoked the question of why is it that firms do not come to an understanding and agree on sharing the market at the monopoly price the answer is that from the point of view of a firm if the rivals follow the agreement it is in the interest of the firm to depart from it since this way it can increase its profits in other words there is an incentive to cheat cournot thought that monopoly or cartel type agreements could only be maintained by means of a formal engagement p 83 our author also considered competition of

lechatelier samuelson principle in games and pass through of shocks abstract the lechatelier samuelson principle states that as a reaction to a shock an agent s short run adjustment of an affected action is smaller than its long run adjustment when the agent can also adjust other related actions we extend the principle to strategic environments where the long run adjustment also accounts for other players adjusting their strategies we show that the principle holds for supermodular games strategic complements satisfying monotone comparative statics and provide sufficient conditions for the principle to hold in games of strategic substitutes heterogeneity we discuss the principle s implications for cost pass through of multiproduct firms

on the existence of pure and mixed strategy nash equilibria in discontinuous games a game is better reply secure if for every nonequilibrium strategy x and every payoff vector limit u resulting from strategies approaching x some player i has a strategy yielding a payoff strictly above u i even if the others deviate slightly from x if strategy spaces are compact and convex payoffs are quasiconcave in the owner s strategy and the game is better reply secure then a pure strategy nash equilibrium exists better reply security holds in many economic games it also permits new results on the existence of symmetric and mixed strategy nash equilibria

on the effects of entry in cournot markets in the framework of symmetric cournot oligopoly this paper provides two minimal sets of assumptions on the demand and cost functions that imply respectively that as the number of firms increases the minimal and maximal equilibria lead to i decreasing industry price and increasing or decreasing per firm output and ii increasing industry price and decreasing per firm output in both cases per firm profits are decreasing the analysis relies crucially on lattice theoretic methods and yields general unambiguous and easily interpretable conclusions of a global nature as a byproduct of independent interest new insight into existence of cournot equilibrium is developed

imperfect durability and the coase conjecture this article considers a market served by a monopolist who sells a durable good that depreciates stochastically over time we show that there exist three types of stationary equilibria a coase conjecture equilibrium a monopoly equilibrium and a reputational equilibrium when the depreciation rate is low the coase conjecture equilibrium is the unique equilibrium for intermediate values of the depreciation rate all three equilibrium types coexist when the depreciation rate is high the monopoly equilibrium is the unique equilibrium consequently when selling a good of sufficiently low durability the monopolist does not lose any of her monopoly power furthermore the steady state output in the reputational equilibrium falls below the monopoly quantity hence in durable goods markets welfare losses due to monopoly power may be larger than in markets for perishables

an econometric analysis of residential expenditures on energy conservation and renewable energy sources abstract economic theory suggests that residential expenditures on energy conservation and renewable energy sources will be determined by the ability of households to purchase conservation inputs their incentive to invest in conserving energy the energy efficiency of existing homes and miscellaneous factors such as climate and age of the home owner empirical analyses of energy related expenditures reported on individual income tax returns confirm the importance of household income energy price increases and climate conditions in determining energy conservation investments income tax credits are also found to have stimulated residential spending on conservation and renewable energy

rural versus urban preferences for renewable energy developments development of renewable energy resources such as wind farms and hydro electric schemes are being promoted as a new method of expanding and diversifying employment in rural areas however such energy projects are associated with a range of environmental impacts which might be detrimental to other economic activities such as those based on nature tourism the authors use a choice experiment to quantify peoples preferences over environmental and employment impacts that may result from the deployment of renewable energy projects in rural areas of scotland focussing in particular on any differences between the preferences of urban and rural dwellers and on heterogeneity within these groups rural and urban households are shown to have different welfare gains which are dependent on the type of renewable energy technology and on the scale of project under consideration

on the existence of cournot equilibrium this paper examines the existence of n firm cournot equilibrium in a market for a single homogeneous commodity it proves that if each firm s marginal revenue declines as the aggregate output of other firms increases which is implied by concave inverse demand then a cournot equilibrium exists without assuming that firms have nondecreasing marginal cost or identical technologies also if the marginal revenue condition fails at a potential optimal point there is a set of firms such that no cournot equilibrium exists the paper also contains an example of nonexistence with two nonidentical firms each with constant returns to scale production