endogenous discounting the world saving glut and the u s current account abstract we study the evolution of the u s current account in a two country dynamic stochastic endowment model in which a single non state contingent bond is the only internationally traded asset the paper focuses on the world saving glut as the primary cause of continual deterioration in the current account and departs from the standard framework by introducing a three parameter model of the subjective discount factor that depends on societal per capita variables that are external to household choices when agents in the model are presented with u s and rest of world endowment data as the realization of the exogenous state vector endogenously driven short run international differences in subjective discounting that display increasing relative u s impatience create saving and current account imbalances that matches patterns observed in the data

cores of inventory centralization games abstract consider a set of n stores with single item and single period demands assume an option of centralized ordering and inventory with holding and penalty costs only in this case a cooperative inventory centralization game defines allocations of the cost we examine the conditions under which such an inventory centralization game has a nonempty core we prove the existence of nonempty core for demands with symmetric distributions and the existence of nonempty core for joint multivariate normal demand distribution we establish the equivalency of four different nonempty core conditions for the newsboy problem and demonstrate their efficacy for discrete independent and identically distributed iid demands journal of economic literature classification numbers c44 c62 c71

the optimal cycle time for epq inventory model under permissible delay in payments abstract goyal journal of the operational research society 36 1985 35 38 discusses the economic order quantity under conditions of permissible delay in payments an implicit assumption of goyal journal of the operational research society 36 1985 35 38 is that the items are obtained from an outside supplier the entire lot size is delivered at the same time if we wish to adopt all results obtained by goyal journal of the operational research society 36 1985 35 38 then we are effectively assuming that the replenishment rate is infinite the main purpose of this paper is to extend goyal journal of the operational research society 36 1985 35 38 to the case that the units are replenished at a finite rate when the replenishment rate approaches to infinite goyal journal of the operational research society 36 1985 35 38 will be a special case of this paper

the newsvendor game has a nonempty core we settle an open conjecture regarding the newsvendor game we prove that its core is always non empty for all possible joint distributions of the random demands we give sufficient conditions under which the core is a singleton or it contains non negative elements

farsighted coalitional stability abstract i define the largest consistent set a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts act publicly and are fully farsighted in that a coalition considers the possibility that once it acts another coalition might react a third coalition might in turn react and so on without limit i establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting i argue that it improves on the von neumann morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

indeterminacy and sunspots with constant returns recently there has been a renewed interest in the possibility of indeterminacy and sunspots or alternatively put in the existence of a continuum of equilibria that arises in dynamic economies with some market imperfections much of the research in this area has been concerned with the empirical plausibility of indeterminacy in markets with external effects or with monopolistic competition and which exhibit some degree of increasing returns while the early results on indeterminacy relied on relatively large increasing returns and high markups more recently benhabib and farmer 1996a showed that indeterminacy can also occur in two sector models with small sector specific external effects and very mild increasing returns

stability and monotonicity in newsvendor situations this study considers a supply chain that consists of n retailers each of them facing a newsvendor problem and a supplier groups of retailers might increase their expected joint profit by joint ordering and inventory centralization however we assume that the retailers impose some level of stock that should be dedicated to them in this situation we show that the associated cooperative game has a non empty core afterwards we concentrate on a dynamic situation where several model cost parameters and the retailers dedicated stock levels can change we investigate how the profit division might be affected by these changes we focus on four monotonicity properties we identify several classes of games with retailers where some of the monotonicity properties hold moreover we show that pairs of cooperative games associated with newsvendor situations do not necessarily satisfy these properties in general when changes in dedicated stock levels are in concern

market imperfections and the instability of open economies in the presence of small market imperfections the transitional dynamics of an open economy can become indeterminate in that there exist an infinite number of equilibrium paths converging to a unique steady state in contrast to closed economy models in the open economy such indeterminacy can arise independently of the curvature of the utility function in consumption the results suggest that with market imperfections open economies can be subject to fluctuations caused by randomness unrelated to the economy s fundamentals

opec s oil exporting strategy and macroeconomic in stability aguiar conraria and wen 2008 argued that dependence on foreign oil raises the like lihood of equilibrium indeterminacy economic instability for oil importing countries we argue that this relation is more subtle the endogenous choices of prices and quantities by a cartel of oil exporters such as the opec can aect the directions of the changes in the likelihood of equilibrium indeterminacy we show that uctuations driven by self ful lling expectations under oil shocks are easier to occur if the cartel sets the price of oil but the re sult is reversed if the cartel sets the quantity of production these results oer a potentially interesting explanation for the decline in economic volatility i e the great moderation in oil importing countries since the mid 1980s when the opec cartel changed its market strategies from setting prices to setting quantities despite the fact that oil prices are far more volatile today than they were 30 years ago

macroeconomic effects of efficiency policies for energy intensive industries the case of the uk climate change agreements 2000 2010 abstract this paper reports a study modeling the uk climate change agreements ccas and related energy efficiency policies for energy intensive industrial sectors bottom up estimates of the effects of these policies are introduced into the energy demand equations of a top down dynamic econometric model of the uk economy with fifty industrial sectors mdm e3 this allowed estimation of the effects of the reduced energy use for the outputs from the sectors i e the reductions in unit costs of the energy intensive industries on the demand for their outputs both in the uk and in the export markets the model is solved as a counterfactual 2000 2005 and as a projection 2005 2010 in a series of scenarios to allow estimation of the effects of the policies on inflation and growth as well as on overall energy demand and co 2 emissions the system wide final energy reductions is estimated to be 4 2 mtoe or 2 6 of total final demand for energy by 2010 including a rebound effect of 19 with negligible effects on inflation and a slight increase in economic growth through improved international competitiveness

indeterminacy and increasing returns abstract we investigate properties of the one sector growth model with increasing returns under two organizational structures capable of reconciling the existence of aggregate increasing returns with competitive behavior by firms the first involves input externalities the second involves monopolistic competition we show for parameters in close accord with recent literature on real business cycles that the model displays an indeterminate steady state that can be exploited to generate a model of business fluctuations driven by self fulfilling beliefs in our first class of models growth is generated by exogenous increases in factor productivity in the second class the marginal product of capital is large enough for endogenous growth journal of economic literature classification numbers e00 e3 o40

trade credit and productive efficiency in developing countries abstract in developing countries credit shortages are often so severe as to impact a firm s day to day production decisions using firm level data from five african countries i show supplier credit is positively correlated with capacity utilization the result continues to hold when credit access is instrumented using supplier characteristics i claim that this is because firms lacking credit likely face inventory shortages leading to lower rates of capacity utilization this explanation yields several further predictions that are supported by the data there is a positive relationship between supplier credit and inventory holdings moreover raw materials stockouts are positively correlated with capacity utilization particularly in inventory intensive industries

an inventory model with deteriorating items under inflation when a delay in payment is permissible abstract this study develops an inventory model for initial stock dependent consumption rate when a delay in payment is permissible in the inventory model shortages are not allowed the effect of the inflation rate deterioration rate initial stock dependent consumption rate and delay in payment are discussed in the study mathematical models are also derived under two different circumstances i e case i the credit period is less than or equal to the cycle time for settling the account and case ii the credit period is greater than the cycle time for settling the account besides expressions for an inventory system s total cost are derived for these two cases moreover a computational procedure and gino lasdon et al acm transactions mathematical software 4 1978 34 50 are proposed to obtain the optimal order size and cycle time the results can help managers determine the optimal total cost finally a numerical example demonstrates the applicability of the proposed model

preferences endogenous discount rate and indeterminacy in a small open economy model abstract this paper characterizes indeterminacy conditions for a small open economy business cycle model the preferences are the utility function commonly used in closed economy models in the literature coupled with an endogenously determined discount rate it shows that indeterminacy can occur under arbitrarily small external effects independently of the intertemporal elasticities in consumption and labor supply

modeling of industrial energy consumption an introduction and context industrial energy accounts for roughly one third of total global energy consumption and is expected to continue to use a similar share in the foreseeable future however this is one of the hardest end uses to analyze model and forecast the reasons for modeling industrial energy consumption are as varied as the ways in which energy is used in production processes this has led to the application of a broad set of emperical tools from several different disciplines in this article we provide an introduction and context for a compendium or survey of the methods used in this area this special issue of energy economics is designed to provide both newcomers and accomplished researchers with an overview of the current state of development in the are of industrial energy modeling

population monotonic allocation schemes for cooperative games with transferable utility abstract an allocation scheme for a cooperative game specifies how to allocate the worth of every coalition it is population monotonic if each player s payoff increases as the coalition to which he belongs grows larger we show that essentially a game has a population monotonic allocation scheme pmas if and only if it is a positive linear combination of monotonic simple games with veto control a dual characterization is also provided sufficient conditions for the existence of a pmas include convexity and increasing average marginal contributions if the game is convex its extended shapley value is a pmas classification number 026

cooperation between multiple news vendors with transshipments we study a situation with n retailers each of them facing a news vendor problem i e selling to customers over a finite period of time product with a short life cycle such as fashion groups of retailers might improve their expected joint profit by coordinating their orders followed by transshipments after demand realization is known we analyze these situations by defining a cooperative game called a general news vendor game for such a situation with n retailers we concentrate on whether it makes sense to cooperate by studying properties of general news vendor games our main result states that general news vendor games have non empty cores

balanced budget consumption taxes and aggregate stability in a small open economy in a small open economy facing a perfect world capital market this paper shows that if the government follows a balanced budget fiscal policy based on endogenous consumption tax rates then the steady state is saddle path stable and hence beliefs driven aggregate instability can be ruled out this result is in contrast to those obtained in some closed economy models and it suggests that unrestricted world capital mobility can help stabilize the economy under the balanced budget fiscal policy based on consumption taxation

production inventory games a new class of totally balanced combinatorial optimization games in this paper we introduce a new class of cooperative games that arise from production inventory problems several agents have to cover their demand over a finite time horizon and shortages are allowed each agent has its own unit production inventory holding and backlogging cost cooperation among agents is given by sharing production processes and warehouse facilities agents in a coalition produce with the cheapest production cost and store with the cheapest inventory cost we prove that the resulting cooperative game is totally balanced and the owen set reduces to a singleton the owen point based on this type of allocation we find a population monotonic allocation scheme for this class of games finally we point out the relationship of the owen point with other well known allocation rules such as the nucleolus and the shapley value

stable farsighted coalitions in competitive markets in this paper we study dynamic alliance formation among agents in competitive markets we look at n agents selling substitutable products competing in a market in this setting we examine models with deterministic and stochastic demand and we use a two stage approach in stage 1 agents form alliances coalitions and in stage 2 coalitions make decisions price and inventory and compete against one another to analyze the stability of coalition structures in stage 1 we use two notions from cooperative games the largest consistent set lcs and the equilibrium process of coalition formation epcf which allow players to be farsighted thus in forming alliances players consider two key phenomena first players trade off the size of the total profit of the system versus their allocation of this total pie and second they weigh the possibility that an immediate beneficial defection can trigger further counter defections that in the end may prove to be worse than the status quo in particular one such example is that of the grand coalition which we show to be stable in the farsighted sense even though players benefit myopically by defecting from it we also provide conditions under which a situation of a few lone players competing against a large coalition is stable we examine the impact of the size of the market n the degree of competition the effect of cost parameters and the variability of the demand process on the prices inventory levels and structure of the market we discuss the possible strategic implications of our results to firms in a competitive market and for new entrants

trade credit for supply chain coordination abstract trade credit is a seller s short term loan to the buyer allowing the buyer to delay payment of an invoice it has been the largest source of working capital for a majority of business to business firms in the united states numerous theories have been proposed to explain trade credit mainly from finance perspectives it has also been an important issue in supply chain management surprisingly most literature in supply chain management has examined the retailer s stocking policies given a supplier s trade credit this paper attempts to shed light on trade credit from a supplier s perspective and presents it as a tool for supply chain coordination specifically we explicitly assume firms financial needs for inventory following a newsvendor framework we assume that the supplier grants trade credit and markdown allowance given the supplier s offer the retailer determines order quantity and the financing option for the inventory either trade credit or direct financing from a financial institution our result shows that the supplier s markdown allowance alone cannot fully coordinate the supply chain if the retailer employs direct financing positive financing costs call for trade credit in order to subsidize the retailer s costs of inventory financing using trade credit in addition to markdown allowance the supplier fully coordinates the retailer s decisions for the largest joint profit and extracts a greater portion of the maximized joint profit

review on integrated strategies for energy policy planning and evaluation of ghg mitigation alternatives abstract this review paper is devoted to elaborating the status of different energy policy planning studies and the evaluation of various ghg mitigation studies it includes some of the major developments in global energy scenario status of green house gas ghg emissions issues in the implementation of kyoto protocol and ghg mitigation clean development mechanism cdm and energy scenario especially pertaining to the residential industrial and commercial energy sector in the initial sections the later part of this paper highlights the salient contributions in various literatures pertaining to energy demand forecasting in residential commercial and industrial sector ghg estimation methodologies and ghg mitigation studies in various sectors the success and difficulties in implementing various policy planning practices were also discussed in the paper most of the prominent literature in the area of energy demand and consumption analysis towards effective implementation of ghg mitigation is described in the end a comprehensive comments and recommendations based on the study were furnished

shipment consolidation who pays for it and how much this paper examines the subject of cost allocation in a multiple product inventory system allowing for consolidation of shipments if we order multiple items using an economic order quantity eoq policy and consolidate shipments part of the ordering cost is shared and part is specific to each item we want to find the consolidation choice with optimal total cost and divide the cost fairly among the individual items such a fair division is central to a costing system in which no group of items subsidizes the others there are no free riders we use a cooperative inventory game to determine when this can be done this game is usually not concave so we want to know what consolidation combinations determine when this cost can be fairly divided using the core of the game we prove that consolidation of all the items is cheaper exactly if there are fair cost allocations core of the game is not empty which happens when the portion of the ordering cost common to all items is not too small we further show how sensitive the nonempty core result is to adjustments in the cost parameters and show how to determine a threshold value for the shared ordering cost which assures the existence of a fair cost allocation

formation of alliances in internet based supply exchanges in different industries such as automobiles chemicals or retailing competitors are joining forces in establishing electronic marketplaces to reduce inefficiencies in the purchasing process and cut costs by combining their buying power joining such an alliance leads to reduced costs including those of possible rivals because members share the development and operating costs a company that joins an alliance agrees to share its suppliers with others which may lead to more intense competition among the increased number of suppliers and it may further benefit an alliance member at the expense of companies left outside the alliance natural questions that could arise then are when would a firm prefer to take part in an electronic marketplace joint venture when would it prefer that other firms possibly rivals join the venture and what are the financial consequences of either joining an alliance or remaining independent in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the issues we have developed a model of three retailers whose products may have a certain degree of substitutability we provide some conditions in terms of product substitutability and compatibility of retailers that would lead to the formation of a three member alliance or a two member alliance or no alliance at all we also study the effect of alliance structure and compatibility of retailers on the profit of a company

on optimal payment time for a retailer under permitted delay of payment by the wholesaler abstract jamal et al 2000 optimal payment time for a retailer under permitted delay of payment by the wholesaler international journal of production economics 66 59 66 study a wholesaler retailer supply chain where the retailer is given a permissible credit period to pay back the dues without paying any interest to the wholesaler the problem is modeled as a cost minimization problem with two decision variables the payment time p of the retailer and the length of the inventory cycle t while the model represents in general an interesting problem we show in this note that there are a number of nontrivial flaws contained in the development of their model and therefore the solution they derived is not correct we give the correct model and derive the corresponding optimal solution

balanced budget income taxes and aggregate stability in a small open economy abstract in a closed economy a balanced budget fiscal policy rule with endogenous income tax rates can generate aggregate instability due to self fulfilling expectations e g schmitt grohe and uribe 1997 this paper shows both analytically and numerically that beliefs driven aggregate instability associated with such a balanced budget rule is less of a problem in a small open economy integrated in the world asset and goods markets this is because cross border capital flows and endogenous international price adjustments produce income effects that reduce the likelihood of sunspot equilibria from a policy perspective our results relieve possible concerns that balanced budget rules and reliance on income taxes to achieve budget objective could have destabilizing effects on the economy

trade structure and belief driven fluctuations in a global economy abstract this paper constructs a dynamic two country model with country specific production externalities and inspects the presence of equilibrium indeterminacy under alternative trade structures it is shown that the presence of belief driven economic fluctuations caused by equilibrium indeterminacy is closely related to the specified trade structure if investment goods are not internationally traded and international lending and borrowing are allowed then indeterminacy arises in a wider set of parameter space than in the corresponding closed economy by contrast either if both consumption and investment goods are traded in the absence of international lending and borrowing or if only investment goods are traded with financial transactions then the indeterminacy conditions are the same as those for the closed economy counterpart

inventory games with permissible delay in payments abstract meca et al 2004 studied a class of inventory games which arise when a group of retailers who observe demand for a common item decide to cooperate and make joint orders with the eoq policy in this paper we extend their model to the situation where retailer s delay in payments is permitted by the supplier we introduce the corresponding inventory game with permissible delay in payments and prove that its core is nonempty then a core allocation rule is proposed which can be reached through population monotonic allocation scheme under this allocation rule the grand coalition is shown to be stable from a farsighted point of view

the energy demand in the british and german industrial sectors heterogeneity and common factors abstract this paper estimates energy demands for the german and british industrial sectors over the 1978 2004 and the 1991 2004 samples from time series models we can conclude that there is a considerable variation in the value of the coefficients across sectors even though energy demands with sensible parameters can rarely be estimated when using a panel approach the ability of some estimators to allow for diversity across subsectors was an important factor in explaining the estimates for price elasticity on the other hand correlation across panel members or common factors did not markedly influence our results with regard to the estimated parameters our preferred choice for elasticity of economic activity and price in the longer sample is 0 52 and 0 64 similar values are found in the case of the shorter samples bearing in mind the high price elasticity energy taxes can be considered an effective strategy for reducing energy consumption

save production a bottom up energy model for dutch industry and agriculture a new version of the model save production simulates the development of energy use in the dutch industry and agriculture including combined heat and power generation the model disaggregates national energy consumption into fuel types industrial sectors energy functions and energy technologies simulation is based on microeconomic investment behavior examples of model application show results on the penetration of combined heat and power in relation to policy instruments such as co2 prices electricity price support and investment subsidies policies that discriminate on co2 emissions result in a slightly more efficient heat and power generation tailored to the dutch situation save production is well equipped to generate outlooks for the dutch industrial and agricultural energy use and for analyzing the role of policies in detail its main strength lies in the middle term simulation of decision making on energy saving technologies and analysis of policy effects specific precautions are required when the model is used for analysis on the longer term for simulating extreme policies or for the analysis of extremely fluctuating energy prices

indeterminacy in a small open economy ramsey growth model abstract this paper presents a small open economy version of the j benhabib and r e a farmer 1996 j monet econ 37 421 443 two sector optimal growth model with production externalities it is shown that indeterminacy is considerably easier to obtain under a regime of perfect world capital markets than in the closed economy variant furthermore the result is not dependent on a high labor supply elasticity since that input is fixed the paper also examines a variant which takes into account external borrowing constraints and it is shown that the qualitative results on indeterminacy remain basically unaffected by this extension journal of economic literature classification numbers e32 f12

barriers to energy efficiency in industrial bottom up energy demand models a review the goal of this paper is to review bottom up models for industrial energy demand with a particular focus on their capability to model barriers to the adoption of energy efficient technologies the integration of barriers into the models is an important prerequisite for a more detailed and realistic modeling of policies for energy efficiency particularly with the emergence of more and more varying policy instruments it also becomes crucial for the models to take account of these policies as well as the barriers they address in a more realistic way our review revealed that despite the broadly evident existence of market failures and barriers for energy efficient technologies they are only partly and in a rather aggregated form considered in today s bottom up models the state of the art bottom up model is based on an explicit representation of the technology stock and considers the costs of energy efficiency options in detail but with regard to barriers most models only make use of an aggregated approach like an adjusted discount rate while some models do not even consider technology costs and energy prices but instead use exogenous technology diffusion rates other more advanced models took first steps towards considering barriers in more detail the latter allows differentiation between multiple parameters that influence technology adoption still even in the most advanced models only a few of the observed barriers are explicitly considered at the same time new approaches to considering barriers like uncertainty or the slow spread of information are being developed in other disciplines we conclude the paper by summarizing promising ways to improve representation of barriers in bottom up models

transshipment of inventories among retailers myopic vs farsighted stability the author considers a model of a decentralized distribution system consisting of n retailers selling an identical product retailers face a stochastic demand and must order their initial inventory before this demand is realized after demand realization retailers decide how much of their unsold inventory or unsatisfied demand they want to share with other retailers this is followed by a transshipment of leftover inventories and distribution of the additional profit generated through inventory sharing the author addresses the following issue suppose that the retailers distribute the profit from inventory sharing according to an allocation rule that induces retailers to share their residuals in a way that maximizes the additional profit such as the shapley value but may not belong to the core is it likely that in this framework all retailers will jointly share their residuals and not form subcoalitions previous research has looked at this problem from a myopic viewpoint and concluded that the grand coalition is not stable unlike the prior work the author looks at stability in a farsighted sense that is retailers do not consider only their immediate payoffs but are also concerned with reactions of other retailers to their actions in a symmetric setting with identical additional unit revenues from transshipments generated by all retailers farsighted retailers always maximize their allocations by not defecting from the grand coalition the author also provides conditions when the same is true for nonidentical additional unit revenues