perishable inventory theory a review this paper reviews the relevant literature on the problem of determining suitable ordering policies for both fixed life perishable inventory and inventory subject to continuous exponential decay we consider both deterministic and stochastic demand for single and multiple products both optimal and sub optimal order policies are discussed in addition a brief review of the application of these models to blood bank management is included the review concludes with a discussion of some of the interesting open research questions in the area

political pluralism public policies and organizational choices banking branch expansion in india 1948 2003 data on the expansion of 94 commercial banks in india from 1948 to 2003 were analyzed to test the proposition that political pluralism wherein competing parties control the state and national governments of a nation can promote business expansion the results confirm that such political pluralism reduces the power of either government to constrain business decision making but that pluralism might at times lead to unhealthy competition between parties harming local expansion opportunities the data show that in india banks selectively exploit political pluralism to guide their expansion decisions

academic earmarks and the returns to lobbying abstract in this paper we estimate the returns to lobbying by universities to motivate our empirical work we develop a simple theoretical model of university lobbying for academic earmarks our statistical analysis shows that universities represented by a house appropriations committee hac or senate appropriations committee sac member spend less money on lobbying than those that are not represented in addition using instrumental variables estimations we show that universities without hac or sac representation may receive some benefit to lobbying for earmarks although in many estimations this benefit is not statistically different from zero however for universities with hac or sac representation a 10 percent increase in lobbying yields an additional 2 8 percent or 3 5 percent increase in earmarks respectively this suggests that there are large returns to lobbying for academic earmarks if a university is represented by a member of one the hac or sac but little or no return if not

the role of corporate donations in chinese political markets many corporations actively engage in political activities to enhance their relationships with politicians facilitating access to scarce resources and creating competitive advantages we investigate corporate donations to explore how they initiate interactions between firms and new local leaders in china specifically we propose that political turnover creates unique opportunities for firms to win over new officials via corporate donations especially in competitive markets moreover we find that firms that make generous donations at the beginning of a new city secretary s tenure receive more attention from representatives of new local leaders especially firms that were politically disadvantaged under a predecessor s governance empirical studies on the turnover of city secretaries between 2001 and 2012 in china strongly support our hypotheses consequently this study improves our understanding of how corporate donations initiate social exchanges between firms and politicians

the structure of political institutions and effectiveness of corporate political lobbying this paper investigates how the structure of political institutions influences the effectiveness of corporate political lobbying by shaping the veto points and entry points that lobbying firms encounter and require respectively when attempting to influence public policies in so doing this study deepens our understanding of the strategic implications of institutional environments using large sample and cross country firm level data we find that the influence of firms lobbying activities on public policies is weakened when there are tighter constraints generated as a result of greater political partisan competition and more subnational government tiers we find that the negative association between the effectiveness of lobbying and political partisan competition is particularly pronounced in countries with lower electoral accountability and that the negative association between the effectiveness of lobbying and subnational government tiers is particularly pronounced in more centralized politi

an order level lot size inventory model with inventory level dependent demand and deterioration abstract many inventory models have been developed for various deteriorating items with constant demand rate it is a common experience that for perishable consumer goods the age of inventory has a negative impact on the demand due to the loss of consumer confidence on such product consumers tend to keep off perishable items which have reached closer to their expiry dates this paper describes an inventory model in which the demand is considered as a composite function consisting of a constant component and a variable component which is proportional to the inventory level in the periods when there is a positive inventory buildup the rate of production is considered finite and the decay rate as exponential the total cost function is composed of four cost components of all phases of the cycle backorder replenishment inventory buildup inventory depletion and shortage this cost function is later reduced to a two variable function using boundary relations to determine iteratively the set of values of the variables that resulted in minimum cost per cycle the optimum lot size and order level were then obtained with relations established previously results are demonstrated for an instance of the model

approximation algorithms for perishable inventory systems we develop the first approximation algorithms with worst case performance guarantees for periodic review perishable inventory systems with general product lifetime for both backlogging and lost sales models the demand process can be nonstationary and correlated over time capturing such features as demand seasonality and forecast updates the optimal control policy for such systems is notoriously complicated thus finding effective heuristic policies is of practical importance in this paper we construct a computationally efficient inventory control policy called the proportional balancing policy for systems with an arbitrarily correlated demand process and show that it has a worst case performance guarantee less than 3 in addition when the demands are independent and stochastically nondecreasing over time we propose another policy called the dual balancing policy which admits a worst case performance guarantee of 2 we demonstrate through an extensive numerical study that both policies perform consistently close to optimal

an optimal ordering and issuing policy for a two stage inventory system for perishable products this paper considers the problem of ordering and issuing policies arising in controlling finite life time fresh meat carcass inventories in supermarkets a supermarket orders a product which constitutes a set of sub products of fixed proportion from a vendor at the beginning of each time cycle after it is received from the vendor the product is stored in the cool room before being issued to the display shelves the sub products then satisfy random customer demand after passing the life time sub products are salvaged in this system the sub products are issued to the display shelves according to theorder up to level policies at the beginning of every period the decisions to be taken to solve this problem are the product ordering quantity from the outside vendor and the order up to issuing quantities for each sub product the objective function to be maximized is the expected profit per unit time consisting of revenue from sales and salvage and the cost of ordering processing or issuing inventory holding emergency issuing and shortage in this paper we first develop a mathematical model describing actual operations and then simplify the sub product runout period so that optimal ordering and issuing policies are easily established we then carry out extensive numerical experiments for a case of two sub products in order to ascertain the properties and the behavior of the optimal solutions

blood platelet inventory management with protection levels abstract we consider a discrete time inventory system for a perishable product where demand exists for product of different ages an example of such a product is blood platelets in addition to the classical costs for inventory holding outdating and shortage our model includes substitution mismatch costs incurred when a demand for a certain aged item is satisfied by a different aged item we propose a simple inventory replenishment and allocation heuristic to minimize the expected total cost over an infinite time horizon in our heuristic inventory of the newest items is replenished in fixed quantities and the newest items are protected for future use by limiting some substitutions when making allocation decisions according to a critical level policy we model our problem as a markov decision process mdp derive the costs of our heuristic policy and computationally compare this policy to extant near optimal policies in the literature our extensive computational study shows that our policy leads to superior performance compared to existing heuristics in the literature particularly when supplies are limited

blood inventory management an overview of theory and practice blood inventory management has attracted significant interest from the operations research profession during the last 15 years a number of methodological contributions have been made in the areas of inventory theory and combinatoric optimization that can be of use to other products or systems these contributions include the development of exact and approximate ordering and issuing policies for an inventory system the analysis of lifo or multi product systems and various forms of distribution scheduling in addition many of these results have been implemented either as decision rules for efficient blood management in a hospital or as decision support systems for hierarchical planning in a regional blood center in this paper we attempt a review of the recent operations research contributions to blood inventory management theory and practice whereas many problems have been solved others remain open and new ones keep being created with advances in medical technology and practices our approach is not to present an exhaustive review of all the literature in the field but rather to address several important issues from a unified perspective of theory and practice and point out new areas for further research

bureaucratic discretion or congressional control regulatory policymaking by the federal trade commission this paper extends stigler and peltzman s approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature the model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications the paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior the first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion the second assumes that congress controls agency decisions the recent behavior of the federal trade commission provides the empirical setting substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over ftc decisions

review of inventory systems with deterioration since 2001 abstract this paper presents an up to date review of the advances made in the field of inventory control of perishable items deteriorating inventory the last extensive review on this topic dates back to 2001 goyal s k and giri b c recent trends in modeling of deteriorating inventory european journal of operational research 134 1 16 since then over two hundred articles on this subject have been published in the major journals on inventory control indicating the need for a new review we use the classification of goyal and giri based on shelf life characteristics and demand characteristics contributions are highlighted by discussing main system characteristics including price discounts backordering or lost sales single or multiple items one or two warehouses single or multi echelon average cost or discounted cash flow and payment delay

information sharing and order variability control under a generalized demand model the value of information sharing and how it could address the bullwhip effect have been the subject of studies in the literature most of these studies used different forms of demand models assuming that no order smoothing was used by the retailer and that the supplier has full knowledge of the retailer s demand model and order policy in this paper we contribute to the literature by starting with a most general demand model coupled with a smoothing policy for order variability control in addition we do not require that the supplier has full knowledge of the retailer s demand model and order policy but instead let the retailer share its projected future orders and freely revise them as the retailer sees fit under such a setting we first obtain a unifying formula for the magnitude of the bullwhip effect the formula indicates that it is the forecast correlation over the exposure period as a whole that determines the magnitude of the bullwhip effect we then quantify the value of information sharing and generalize the existing results in the literature finally we explore the optimal smoothing parameters that could benefit the total supply chain the resulting optimal policy resembles the postponement strategy we find that information sharing together with order postponement improves the supply chain performance even though the order variability may amplify in some cases

determinants of automobile pac contributions to house incumbents own versus rival effects this paper examines pac contributions by the big threeu s automakers and japanese auto dealers to houseincumbents a regression model is estimated where paccontributions are a function of a firm s own ties toan incumbent s district as measured by firmemployment and those of rivals for the big three own and u s rival effects are positive further theresults do not indicate the presence of a free ridereffect employment by a foreign subsidiary has no neteffect on u s contributions for the japanesedealers japanese plant employment has a positiveimpact on contributions and that of the big three anegative

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

nonmarket strategy performance evidence from u s electric utilities this paper develops and tests a theory of the performance determinants of a firm s nonmarket strategy in shaping public policy outcomes building on the concept of political market attractiveness we argue that nonmarket performance is influenced by both the characteristics of a firm s regulatory and political environment especially rivalry among interest groups or politicians and by internal capabilities that enable a firm to mitigate political transaction costs using data on regulatory filings for rate increases made by u s electric utilities over a 13 year period we find empirical support for our approach

an allocation and distribution model for perishable products this paper presents an allocation model for a perishable product distributed from a regional center to a given set of locations with random demands we consider the combined problem of allocating the available inventory at the center while deciding how these deliveries should be performed two types of delivery patterns are analyzed the first pattern assumes that all demand points receive individual deliveries the second pattern subsumes the frequently occurring case in which deliveries are combined in multistop routes traveled by a fleet of vehicles computational experience is reported

the bullwhip effect progress trends and directions the bullwhip effect refers to the phenomenon where order variability increases as the orders move upstream in the supply chain this paper provides a review of the bullwhip literature which adopts empirical experimental and analytical methodologies early econometric evidence of bullwhip is highlighted findings from empirical and experimental research are compared with analytical and simulation results assumptions and approximations for modelling the bullwhip effect in terms of demand forecast delay replenishment policy and coordination strategy are considered we identify recent research trends and future research directions concerned with supply chain structure product type price competition and sustainability

order variability in perishable product supply chains abstract empirical research has shown that the degree of order variability in supply chains is significantly influenced by product and industry specific factors this paper analyzes the impact of perishability on order variability and the bullwhip effect in supply chains we decompose the ordering process of a retailer into a sales and an outdating process and quantify their short and long term variability and correlation we find differences to non perishable product supply chains driven by the impact of the inventory depletion policy stock out management and retailers service level requirement these three factors significantly affect the retailer s order variability and thus the decision making process and the profitability of the upstream supply stage for the majority of instances the perishable nature of a product results in the ordering process having a lower variability than the demand process only when inventory depletion is dominated by last in first out in high service level environments variability amplification can be observed we propose a dynamic ordering policy for the upstream supply stage taking into account negative correlation of retailer orders between periods this dynamic policy may lead to substantial performance improvements in a sensitivity analysis we investigate the impact of shelf life lead time and demand correlation

effective interim collaboration how firms minimize transaction costs and maximise transaction value this study of automotive transaction relationships in the u s a and japan offers abta which indicate that transaction costs do not necessarily increase with an increase in reiation specijk investments we empirically examine the conditions under which transactors can simultaneously achieve the twin benejits of high asset specificity and low transaction costs this is possible because the dtfferent safeguards which can be employed to control opportunism have different set up costs and result in different transaction costs over dl erent time horizons we examine in detail the ractices of javanese firms which result in effective inteq n collaboration 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

two stage perishable inventory models in this paper we consider perishable inventory systems with two types of demand demand may be for either fresh items or for somewhat older items we model the system with two inventory stages the first stage holds fresh items and the second stage holds the older items we approximate the performance of the two stage inventory system and compare two managerial policies

information transmission and the bullwhip effect an empirical investigation the bullwhip effect is the amplification of demand variability along a supply chain a company bullwhips if it purchases from suppliers more variably than it sells to customers such bullwhips amplifications of demand variability can lead to mismatches between demand and production and hence to lower supply chain efficiency we investigate the bullwhip effect in a sample of 4 689 public u s companies over 1974 2008 overall about two thirds of firms bullwhip the sample s mean and median bullwhips both significantly positive respectively measure 15 8 and 6 7 of total demand variability put another way the mean quarterly standard deviation of upstream orders exceeds that of demand by 20 million we decompose the bullwhip by information transmission lead time estimating the bullwhip s information lead time components with a two stage estimator we find that demand signals firms observe with more than three quarters notice drive 30 of the bullwhip and those firms observe with less than one quarter s notice drive 51 from 1974 1994 to 1995 2008 our sample s mean bullwhip dropped by a third this paper was accepted by christian terwiesch operations management

should retailers hold a perishable product having different ages the case of a homogeneous market and multiplicative demand model this paper specializes in investigating the common practice of the coexistence of multiple competing perishables each with different age and price all of which are associated with the same product the fundamental postulate investigated by our model is the replacement of the policy of selling a single product age with a policy of selling multiple product ages coexistence of multiple product ages on the shelf is associated with shorter cycle lengths as well as with providing consumers with the option of choosing between a fresher product on average and a cheaper product on average we use a utility corresponding to the factors of price and time we axiomatically assume the coexistence of multiple product ages while posing several propositions which present certain difficulties in preferring this policy with the support of a multiplicative demand with respect to price and time and by assuming that consumers are homogeneous in their preferences we analyze a deterministic version of the problem and derive the optimal pricing policy given any cycle length and any duration for which both types coexist on the shelf we prove that the optimal policy is not to sell multiple product types at all by means of a numerical example we show that the operational mode of the coexistence of multiple product ages reduces the retailer s profit per unit time by at least 15 sensitivity analysis of some of the most influential parameters is introduced the superiority of the single product age operational mode over the competitor mode sharply decreases as the optimal cycle length is approached

why is there so little money in u s politics in this paper we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy buying but are rather a form of political participation and consumption we summarize the data on campaign spending and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals not special interests are the main source of campaign contributions moreover we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good dependent upon income and campaign contributions as a percent of gdp have not risen appreciably in over 100 years if anything they have probably fallen we then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators votes finally we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects there is little relationship between money and legislator votes thus the question is not why there is so little money politics but rather why organized interests give at all we conclude by offering potential answers to this question this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

use of multicriteria decision analysis methods for energy planning problems most decision making requires the consideration of several conflicting objectives the term multiple criteria decision analysis mcda describes various methods developed for aiding decision makers in reaching better decisions energy planning problems are complex problems with multiple decision makers and multiple criteria therefore these problems are quite suited to the use of mcda a multitude of mcda methods exists these methods can be divided in three main groups value measurement models goal aspiration and reference level models and outranking models methods from all of these groups have been applied to energy planning problems particularly in the evaluation of alternative electricity supply strategies each of the methods has its advantages and drawbacks however we cannot conclude that one method generally is better suited than the others for energy planning problems a good alternative might be to apply more than one method either in combination to make use of the strengths of both methods or in parallel to get a broader decision basis for the decision maker until now studies of mcda in energy planning have most often considered energy networks with only one energy carrier more advanced energy systems with multiple energy carriers have been neglected even though this field ought to be suitable for use of mcda due to its high complexity many decision makers and many conflicting criteria

national capital city location and subsidiary portfolio expansion the negative effect of geographic distance to the capital city at inception on the speed of subsequent investments a multinational enterprise develops its subsidiary portfolio by investing in new foreign markets and subsequently pursuing further investments within these host countries we find that firms which locate their first equity investment closer to the national capital city can subsequently expand their subsidiary portfolio within the host country at a higher speed this effect is particularly strong in emerging economies further analyses of various contingencies support the robustness of our findings we discuss different theoretical mechanisms which could cause these effects in particular face to face interactions with governmental actors and opportunities to develop political connections our research contributes to the literature on internationalization processes by analyzing how the initial location choice affects the development of the subsidiary portfolio

identifying a distinctive competence forecasting ability in the money fund industry testing the causal link between a firm specific competence and its antecedents or consequences has become a key objective for strategy research over the past decade on one hand case studies can identify a competence but with their small sample size their retrospective research design and their tendency toward sampling on the dependent variable they can not reliably test the causal connection between a competence and its antecedents or its consequences on the other hand variance decomposition studies demonstrate the existence of firm specific performance differentials but have not identified which particular competencies are responsible for them the present paper avoids both of these problems by measuring a particular competence across a large sample of organizations over a long period of time so that a test of statistical causality can be applied to the relationship of this competence to both its antecedents and its consequences the particular competence studied is the ability of money market mutual funds to forecast changes in short term interest rates a competence known from prior research to be both valuable and rare in particular we test the effect of forecasting ability on the economic surplus generated by the fund and its growth conversely we also test the effect of growth on the subsequent development of forecasting ability copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

perspective explaining influence rents the case for an institutions based view of strategy research in strategy has identified and tried to explain four types of rents monopolistic rents efficiency rents quasi rents and schumpeterian rents building on previous work on political and institutional strategies we add a fifth type of rent influence rents influence rents are the extra profits earned by a firm because the rules of the game laws regulations and informal rules are designed or changed to suit it to aid the analysis of the relationship between institutional context and firm performance and to provide a structure to guide research we develop a framework with five key components a an identification of the five fundamental problems of a market economy b a typology that describes the five different types of institutions that emerge to solve these problems c the market ordering mechanisms used by institutions to solve these problems d the common causes of weak institutional performance and e generic strategies used by firms to exploit these weaknesses of an institutional context to enhance firm performance we highlight potential applications of the framework as well as an illustrative research agenda that can advance the development of theory to explain the emergence and persistence of influence rents

businesspeople in elected office identifying private benefits from firm level returns do businesspeople who win elected office use their positions to help their firms business leaders become politicians around the world yet we know little about whether their commitment to public service trumps their own private interests using an original dataset of 2 703 firms in russia i employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of firm directors winning seats in subnational legislatures from 2004 to 2013 first having a connection to a winning politician increases a firm s revenue by 60 and profitability by 15 over a term in office i then test between different mechanisms finding that connected firms improve their performance by gaining access to bureaucrats and not by signaling legitimacy to financiers the value of winning a seat increases in more politically competitive regions but falls markedly when more businesspeople win office in a convocation politically connected firms extract fewer benefits when faced with greater competition from other rent seekers

the impact of consumer advocates on regulatory policy in the electric utility sector we examine the effect of consumer advocate participation in administrative procedures on regulatory policy we use a unique panel database of rate reviews conducted for us electric utilities from 1980 to 2007 to assess how state consumer advocates affect public utility commission decisions on utilities allowed financial returns and rate structures we find first that utilities experience fewer rate reviews in states with consumer advocates consistent with utilities strategically postponing requests for rate increases second after controlling for observed and unobserved state characteristics we find that pucs in states with consumer advocates permit returns on equity that are on average 0 45 percentage points lower than states without advocates equivalent to a 7 9 million 3 7 reduction in average utility operating income all else equal third consumer advocates are associated with lower residential rates relative to other customer classes our findings provide statistical support for the thesis that institutionalizing interest group representation in administrative procedures is one way for legislatures indirectly to influence agency determined policies

how larger demand variability may lead to lower costs in the newsvendor problem in this paper we consider the newsvendor problem intuition may lead to the hypothesis that in this stochastic inventory problem a higher demand variability results in larger variances and in higher costs in a recent paper song 1994a has proved that the intuition is correct for many demand distributions that are commonly used in practice such as for the normal distribution function however this paper shows that there exist demand distributions for which the intuition is misleading i e for which larger variances occur in combination with lower costs to characterize these demand distributions we use stochastic dominance relations

the determinants of industry political activity 1978 1986 c ampaign contributions made by corporate political action committees pacs are increasingly important and controversial in u s elections influence purchasing is often alleged by pundits and campaign finance reform is continually debated in congress in the academy social scientists have analyzed the allocation of interest group monies and have looked for possible impacts on legislation few however have tried to explain the total contributions of economic interest groups we shall analyze variations in contributions across industries and over time with an empirical model based on organizationally constrained profit maximizing behavior we assume that corporate pac contributions in an industry are raised to enhance industry profits subject to the constraints of organization costs and freeriding incentives our empirical work covers 124 industries over five election cycles from 1978 through 1986 both the costs and benefits of political activity vary across industries we argue that the benefits of political action are determined by direct contact with the government as a regulator or purchaser of industry output by government s ability to ameliorate adverse market conditions and by the industry s ability to solve collective action problems without government assistance the costs of industry political action arise mainly from collective action problems because effective political activity often requires concerted action by the constituent firms in each industry we also make a methodological contribution previous studies use statistical techniques that suffer from sample selectivity bias or else force the probability of acting politically to be explained by the same set of coefficients as is the amount of action taken we explain and employ a technique that accounts for both problems the results are consistent with the theses that industries follow investment oriented goals in deciding the amount of political action to undertake and that collective action problems are important constraints on industry political activity we can explain between 60 and 80 of the variation in contributions in our sample first we review existing work on corporate political activity particularly papers examining patterns of aggregate pac spending by industry then we present an organization cost constrained industryprofit maximizing model based on a comparison between an idealized zero organization cost industry and the more realistic case where organizing collective action is difficult the independent variables used in the analysis are also discussed and defined next we discuss the dependent variable and total industry contributions and explain our statistical method then the results are presented followed by a discussion of industry structure and political activity to make clear how our results can explain different contribution patterns we give examples using five actual industries

energy management under policy and technology uncertainty energy managers in public agencies are subject to multiple and sometimes conflicting policy objectives regarding cost environmental and security concerns associated with alternative energy technologies making infrastructure investment decisions requires balancing different distributions of risks and benefits that are far from clear for example managers at permanent army installations must incorporate congressional legislative objectives executive orders department of defense directives state laws and regulations local restrictions and multiple stakeholder concerns when undertaking new energy initiatives moreover uncertainty with regard to alternative energy technologies is typically much greater than that associated with traditional technologies both because the technologies themselves are continuously evolving and because the intermittent nature of many renewable technologies makes a certain level of uncertainty irreducible this paper describes a novel stochastic multi attribute analytic approach that allows users to explore different priorities or weighting schemes in combination with uncertainties related to technology performance to illustrate the utility of this approach for understanding conflicting policy or stakeholder perspectives prioritizing the need for more information and making investment decisions we apply this approach to an energy technology decision problem representative of a permanent military base

bullwhip effect measurement and its implications the bullwhip effect or demand information distortion has been a subject of both theoretical and empirical studies in the operations management literature in this paper we develop a simple set of formulas that describe the traditional bullwhip measure as a combined outcome of several important drivers such as finite capacity batch ordering and seasonality our modeling framework is descriptive in nature as it features certain plausible approximations that are commonly employed in practical inventory systems the results are nonetheless compelling and can be used to explain various conflicting observations in previous empirical studies building on the theoretical framework we discuss the managerial implications of the bullwhip measurement we show that the measurement can be completely noninformative about the underlying supply chain cost performance if it is not linked to the operational details such as decision intervals and leadtimes specifically we show that an aggregated measurement over relatively long time periods can mask the operational level bullwhip in addition we show that masking also exists under product or location aggregation in some illustrative cases

a small world methodology of analysis of interchange energy networks the european behaviour in the economical crisis abstract european energy policy pursues the objective of a sustainable competitive and reliable supply of energy in 2007 the european commission adopted a proper energy policy for europe supported by several documents and included an action plan to meet the major energy challenges europe has to face a farsighted diversified yearly mix of energies was suggested to countries aiming at increasing security of supply and efficiency but a wide and systemic view of energy interchanges between states was missing in this paper a small world methodology of analysis of interchange energy networks iens is presented with the aim of providing a useful tool for planning sustainable energy policies a proof case is presented to validate the methodology by considering the european ien behaviour in the period of economical crisis this network is approached as a small world net from a modelling point of view by supposing that connections between states are characterised by a probability value depending on economic political relations between countries

firm and country level trade offs and contingencies in the evaluation of foreign investment the semiconductor industry 1994 2002 this paper examines the joint impact of firm and country level factors on the international plant location decisions of semiconductor firms from 1994 2002 we find that these factors interact to influence the location decisions of firms investing abroad in a given host country firms with more advanced technological capabilities are more likely to make investments in countries with greater technological sophistication but not in politically hazardous countries where they face greater expropriation hazards firms with less advanced technology are more willing to accept a trade off between country level political hazards and technological sophistication firms also trade off own versus other firm experience as sources of critical knowledge regarding the foreign investment environment

consumer capture of regulatory institutions the creation of public utility consumer advocates in the united states we examine the conditions under which state legislatures in the united states orga nized public utility consumers during the 1970s and 1980s by creating independent consumer advocates with resources and authority to intervene in public utility rate making procedures while economic factors notably utility fuel cost increases were important predictors state political conditions were estimated to have a larger impact on the probability of implemen tation we find that the pattern of adoption is consistent with the hypothesis that legislatures deploy institutions as a mechanism for insulating regulatory policies against future reform in general democrat controlled governments were significantly more likely to implement con sumer advocates when they were less certain about being re elected to office during this period we find also that the effect of political re election expectations was particularly acute for the creation of advocates representing solely residential consumers a relatively disorganized in terest group our results suggest that legislatures organize and publicly fund interest groups to protect supportive but vulnerable groups against adverse future political environments