the hotel yield management with two types of room prices overbooking and cancellations abstract we consider a problem for hotel room allocations with early discount cancellations and overbooking in our model customers can book a room in discounted price if they reserve before a certain deadline the model takes overbooking into account we have expressed the expected total sale function proved it is unimodal on the number of allocated rooms for early discount and for overbooking respectively under a condition and clarified the range where the optimal solution exists we have derived an optimal allocation for early discount in a specified model without cancellations and overbooking

examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 2 review of input output models for the assessment of environmental impacts embodied in trade this paper offers a detailed review of recently described single and multi region input output models used to assess environmental impacts of internationally traded goods and services it is the second part of a two part contribution in part 1 turner k lenzen m wiedmann t and barrett j in press examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis ecological economics we describe how to enumerate the resource and pollution content of inter regional and inter national trade flows with the aim to illustrate an ideal accounting and modelling framework for the estimation of ecological footprints a large number of such environment economic models have been described but only in the last few years models have emerged that use a more sophisticated multi region multi sector input output framework this has been made possible through improvements in data availability and quality as well as computability we identify six major models that employ multi sector multi region input output analysis in order to calculate environmental impacts embodied in international trade results from the reviewed studies demonstrate that it is important to explicitly consider the production recipe land and energy use as well as emissions in a multi region multi sector and multi directional trade model with global coverage and detailed sector disaggregation only then reliable figures for indicators of impacts embodied in trade such as the ecological footprint can be derived

how responsible is a region for its carbon emissions an empirical general equilibrium analysis targets for co2 reduction tend to be set in terms of the amount of pollution generated within the borders of a given region or nation that is under a production accounting principle however in recent years there has been increased public and policy interest in the notion of a carbon footprint or the amount of pollution generated globally to serve final consumption demand within a region or nation that is switching focus to a consumption accounting principle however this paper argues that a potential issue arising from the increasing focus on consumption based carbon footprint type measures is that while regional co2 generation embodied in export production is attributed outside of the region i e to the carbon footprints of other regions nations regional consumers are likely to benefit from such production moreover where there is a geographical and supply chain gap between producers and final consumers it may be difficult to identify precisely whose carbon footprint emissions should be allocated to

pricing option contracts on the strategic petroleum reserve in this article we examine the pricing of option contracts on the strategic petroleum reserve spr and consider how these can be used by both the government and refiners we analyze the interaction between the call and put option contracts taking into account the underlying game in the infinite markov decision process with discounting explaining the relationship between the valuation of options on the spr by refiners and the valuation of financial options on a marker crude in financial markets we conclude that the values of both call and put options on the spr increase with oil prices and decrease with total inventory furthermore our analysis shows that a more active management of the spr creates higher social welfare although refiners profit less from inventories and larger volatility in inventory profits decreasing private investment in petroleum stocks

evaluating natural resource investments notwithstanding impressive advances in the theory of finance over the past 2 decades practical procedures for capital budgeting have evolved only slowly the standard technique which has remained unchanged in essentials since it was originally proposed see dean 1951 bierman and smidt 1960 derives from a simple adaptation of the fisher 1907 model of valuation under certainty under this technique expected cash flows from an investment project are discounted at a rate deemed appropriate to their risk and the resulting present value is compared with the cost of the project this standard textbook technique reflects modern theoretical developments only insofar as estimates of the discount rate may be obtained from crude application of single period asset pricing theory but see brennan 1973 bogue and roll 1974 turnbull 1977 constantinides 1978 the inadequacy of this approach to capital budgeting is widely acknowledged although not widely discussed its obvious deficiency is its the evaluation of mining and other natural resource projects is made particularly difficult by the high degree of uncertainty attaching to output prices it is shown that the techniques of continuous time arbitrage and stochastic control theory may be used not only to value such projects but also to determine the optimal policies for developing managing and abandoning them the approach may be adapted to a wide variety of contexts outside the natural resource sector where uncertainty about future project revenues is a paramount concern

casting a long shadow demand based accounting of canada s greenhouse gas emissions responsibility abstract canada is the only country to have ratified the kyoto protocol and then withdrawn part of the justification for canada s reluctance to commit to greenhouse gas ghg emissions reductions is the country s status as fossil fuel exporter in this paper we use input output analysis and the world input output database wiod to ask whether canada s contribution to global ghg emissions changes when calculated using a demand based shadow emission approach that excludes ghg emissions created in the production of exports like fossil fuels but includes emissions released to produce imports to canada we find that from 1995 to 2005 canada s contribution to global emissions was lower using this demand based ghg accounting approach than a production based approach from 2006 to 2009 however increased imports from ghg intensive trading partners like china meant that canada s demand based shadow emissions were higher than its production based ghg emissions we also introduce a method of calculating sub national ghg shadows using limited data applied to canada this exercise demonstrates that fossil fuel exporting provinces such as alberta and saskatchewan have demand based shadow emissions significantly lower than their production based emissions while populous provinces such as quebec and ontario have demand based emissions that are relatively higher than their production based emissions

capacity management in rental businesses with two customer bases we consider the allocation of capacity in a system in which rental equipment is accessed by two classes of customers we formulate the problem as a continuous time analogue of the one shot allocation problems found in the more traditional literature on revenue management and we analyze a queueing control model that approximates its dynamics our investigation yields three sets of results first we use dynamic programming to characterize properties of optimal capacity allocation policies we identify conditions under which complete sharing in which both classes of customers have unlimited access to the rental fleet is optimal next we develop a computationally efficient aggregate threshold heuristic that is based on a fluid approximation of the original stochastic model we obtain closed form expressions for the heuristic s control parameters and show that the heuristic performs well in numerical experiments the closed form expressions also show that in the context of the fluid approximation revenues are concave and increasing in the fleet size finally we consider the effect of the ability to allocate capacity on optimal fleet size we show that the optimal fleet size under allocation policies may be lower the same as or higher than that under complete sharing as capacity costs increase allocation policies allow for larger relative fleet sizes numerical results show that even in cases in which dollar profits under complete sharing may be close to those under allocation policies the capacity reductions enabled by allocation schemes can help to lift profit margins significantly

embodied carbon dioxide emission at supra national scale a coalition analysis for g7 bric and the rest of the world abstract presented in this study is an empirical analysis of embodied carbon dioxide emissions induced by fossil fuel combustion for the world divided into three supra national coalitions i e g7 bric and the rest of the world row via the application of a multi region input output modeling for 2004 embodied emission intensities for the three coalitions are calculated and compared with market exchange rate and purchase power parity separately used to investigate the difference between nominal and real production efficiencies emissions embodied in different economic activities such as production consumption import and export are calculated and analyzed accordingly and remarkable carbon trade imbalances associated with g7 surplus of 1 53 billion tons or 36 its traded emissions and bric deficit of 1 37 billion tons or 51 its traded emissions and approximate balance with row deficit of 0 16 billion tons or 3 its traded emissions are concretely revealed carbon leakages associated with industry transfer and international trades are illustrated in terms of impacts on global climate policies the last but not least per capita consumption based emissions for g7 bric and row are determined as 12 95 1 53 and 2 22 tons respectively and flexible abatement policies as well as equity on per capita entitlement are discussed

a review of recent multi region input output models used for consumption based emission and resource accounting abstract the interest in consumption based emission and resource accounting has grown significantly many studies juxtapose consumer emissions carbon footprint and producer territorial emissions of greenhouse gases in order to demonstrate the effects of trade on the national emission budget to this end a respectable number of studies have been undertaken worldwide in order to estimate emissions embedded in international trade of numerous countries and world regions input output approaches and increasingly multi region input output mrio models are commonly chosen as they provide an appropriate methodological framework for complete carbon footprint estimates at the national and supra national level with increasing processing capabilities of computers and a wider availability of economic accounts environmental accounts and trade data such models are now being implemented on a wide scale after a brief overview of salient single region input output studies i provide an in depth review of the most recent multi region input output models used for the purpose of consumption based environmental accounting the main methodological features and important results are described for around twenty studies covering the years 2007 to 2009 this is followed by a detailed review of studies dealing with uncertainty in mrio analysis an area which has not received a lot of attention so far i conclude that further research is mainly needed in two areas a improvements in data availability and quality and b improvements in the accuracy of mrio modelling

does ecological economics have a future contradiction and reinvention in the age of climate change abstract this paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field s critical founding principles we first consider robert costanza s treatment of nicholas stern s global deal and then survey climate change related articles published in this journal over the past five years this survey reveals how mainstream neoclassical methodologies dominate discourse and do so by marginalizing more critical political economy analyses this situation imperils the field s founding vision of a no growth steady state it also fails to address the related growth dynamics of capitalism without such a critical treatment the field s formal embrace of methodological pluralism actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent this situation undermines the field s historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm ecological economics now faces a problematic future its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context without such a choice ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro growth imperatives

additional precision provided by region specific data the identification of fuel use and pollution generation coefficients in the jersey economy turner k 2006 additional precision provided by region specific data the identification of fuel use and pollution generation coefficients in the jersey economy regional studies 40 347 364 a debate is currently ongoing in the uk regarding the need to collect and report data at the regional level one specific area of this debate is the extent to which region specific economic and environmental data are required to carry out analyses of devolved sustainability policy issues this paper uses the jersey economy as a case study to assess the added precision from using good quality region specific data compared with adjusted national uk data it is found that due to differences in polluting technology between jersey and the uk estimates based on national emissions intensities produce results that are misleading in terms of both absolute pollution levels and the relative contribution of different activities to total emissions in the economy while jersey may be regarded as atypical in many ways relative

oil stockpiles and import reductions a dynamic programming approach this paper analyzes oil stockpiling policies using models in which u s policy choices are restricted to just two instruments stockpiles and disruption tariffs the model considers the influence of u s and in general oecd import demands upon the opec price for oil and the duration and severity of oil disruptions induced by disturbances among the opec nations our development is based upon a probabilistic view of disruptions analyzed by applying dynamic programming

a dynamic programming model of china s strategic petroleum reserve general strategy and the effect of emergencies abstract to protect the security of energy supply china is building national strategic petroleum reserve spr we present a dynamic programming model to determine the optimal stockpiling and drawdown strategies for china s spr under various scenarios focusing on minimizing the total cost of reserves in contrast to previous research the oil price given in our model is exogenous on a monthly instead of annual basis with a view to more realistic simulation of optimal strategies each year our model results show that in the case where stockpiling affects oil prices a given spr size will be achieved earlier than when stockpiling does not affect oil prices in different emergency conditions the optimal stockpiling and drawdown strategies of china s spr are very different when an emergency occurs the shock of stockpiling on the oil price per barrel could range 0 49 6 35 while the impact of drawdown on the oil price per barrel could range 6 22 to 0 48

developing a market based approach to managing the us strategic petroleum reserve abstract the strategic petroleum reserve has not been used effectively to manage the consequences of oil shocks in the united states the main reason is that political decision makers tend to hoard the reserves during crises and bureaucratic processes delay the sale of the reserves also the enabling legislation focused on ameliorating shortages whereas disruptions result price spikes rather than shortages we develop a markov game of the buildup and drawdown of the reserve in which a public player aims to maximize consumer welfare at the same time private holders of inventory maximize their profit the methodological contribution in this paper is the development of financial options to implement the public player s optimal policy we use the solution of this game to calculate the number and value of options necessary for the private marketplace to trigger the optimal buildup and drawdown of the reserve

an empirical comparison of alternate regime switching models for electricity spot prices one of the most profound features of electricity spot prices are the price spikes markov regime switching mrs models seem to be a natural candidate for modeling this spiky behavior however in the studies published so far the goodness of fit of the proposed models has not been a major focus while most of the models were elegant their fit to empirical data has either been not examined thoroughly or the signs of a bad fit ignored with this paper we want to fill the gap we calibrate and test a range of mrs models in an attempt to find parsimonious specifications that not only address the main characteristics of electricity prices but are statistically sound as well we find that the most universal and robust structure is that of an independent spike 3 regime model with heteroscedastic diffusion type base regime dynamics and shifted spike regime distributions

energy use embodied in china s construction industry a multi regional input output analysis abstract the rapid urbanization process was bound to produce considerable energy demand in china which increased the pressure on sustainable development this study employed a multi regional input output model to investigate energy use embodied in the consumption and interregional trade of china s construction industry results show that as a typical demand driven sector the construction industry consumed 793 74 million tons of coal equivalent in 2007 which is equal to 29 6 of china s total national energy consumption regions have been divided according to different driving forces for energy increment shanxi liaoning heilongjiang henan and sichuan were identified to be driven by their extensive construction activities and inefficient construction process interregional imports of the construction industry represented a resource dependent geographical distribution energy flows are from resource abundant areas in the central part to resource deficient areas in the eastern coast by contrast energy exports represented a regional discrete distribution which mainly transferred energy in the form of labor mobility and service supply this study provided insight into the current energy consumption status of provincial construction industry from both regional and sectoral perspectives which can be a basis for energy policy making and implementation

option valuation of claims on real assets the case of offshore petroleum leases this paper extends financial option theory by developing a methodology for the valuation of claims on a real asset an offshore petroleum lease several theoretical and practical problems not present in applying option pricing theory to financial assets are addressed most importantly we show the necessity of combining option pricing techniques with a model of equilibrium in the market for the underlying asset petroleum reserves the advantages of this approach over conventional discounted cash flow techniques are emphasized the methodological development provides important insights for both company behavior and government policy promising empirical results are reported

flexible lease contracts in the fleet replacement problem with alternative fuel vehicles a real options approach abstract we study the use of flexible lease contacts in the fleet portfolio management problem of a firm that aims to minimize its cost and risk recursive expected conditional value at risk simultaneously in a stochastic multi period setting by deciding which technologies to use in its fleet we propose a model using real options return and swap to model contract flexibility and to account for different uncertainties co2 prices fuel prices mileage covered by a vehicle fuel consumption and technological we analyse how fuel price uncertainty and technological progress influence the value of the options we validate the results using a real world case study conducted in the uk

input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade the effects of sector aggregation abstract energy related co2 emissions embodied in international trade have been widely studied by researchers using the environmental input output analysis framework it is well known that both sector aggregation and spatial aggregation affect the results obtained in such studies with regard to the latter past studies are often conducted at the national level irrespective of country or economy size for a large economy with the needed data studies may be conducted at different levels of spatial aggregation we examine this problem analytically by extending the work of su et al su b huang h c ang b w zhou p 2010 input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade the effects of sector aggregation energy economics 32 1 166 175 on sector aggregation we present a numerical example using the data of china and by dividing the country into eight regions it is found that the results are highly dependent on spatial aggregation our study shows that for a large country like china it is meaningful to look into the effect of spatial aggregation

calculation of embodied energy in sino usa trade 1997 2011 abstract in order to find efficient trade measures to reduce china s energy consumption and to provide theoretical support for the climate talks between china and america we investigate the impact of sino usa trade on energy consumption from the perspective of embodied energy an environmental input output life cycle assessment eio lca model was established to calculate the total energy consumption coefficient the direct consumption coefficient and the complete consumption coefficient of the sectors of the national economies of china and america after taking into consideration the data of every sector of the national economy in sino usa trade energy embodied in the import and export trade between china and america was calculated to verify the real energy flows in sino usa trade the research results suggest the following china is the net exporter of embodied energy in sino usa trade and coal crude oil and natural gas are the major components in 1997 2011 the net exports of china s embodied energy totaled 1523 082 200 t of standard coal the amount of china s energy consumption increased by 895 527 900 t of standard coal and america s energy consumption decreased by 11 871 200 t of standard coal as a result of sino usa trade on this basis corresponding policies and recommendations are proposed

time consistency and risk averse dynamic decision models definition interpretation and practical consequences abstract this paper aims at resolving a major obstacle to practical usage of time consistent risk averse decision models the recursive objective function generally used to ensure time consistency is complex and has no clear direct interpretation practitioners rather choose a simpler and more intuitive formulation even though it may lead to a time inconsistent policy based on rigorous mathematical foundations we impel practical usage of time consistent models as we provide practitioners with an intuitive economic interpretation for the referred recursive objective function we also discourage time inconsistent models by arguing that the associated policies are sub optimal we developed a new methodology to compute the sub optimality gap associated with a time inconsistent policy providing practitioners with an objective method to quantify practical consequences of time inconsistency our results hold for a quite general class of problems and we choose without loss of generality a cvar based portfolio selection application to illustrate the developed concepts

global warming agreements international trade and energy carbon embodiments an input output approach to the italian case abstract in the kyoto protocol the absence of green house gases ghgs commitments of developing countries non annex i and the more flexible terms of implementation which are allowed to countries shifting toward a market economy transition economies naturally lead to the absence or to less constraining national measures and policies of reduction of the ghgs emissions which in turn may determine a comparative advantage in the production of the highest energy carbon intensive commodities for these countries these arguments are valid also considering the future implementation of the european emission allowance trading scheme eats thus developing countries may become a haven for the production of not environmental friendly commodities in this case the so called pollution haven hypothesis stating that due to freer international trade the comparative advantage may change the economic structure and consequently the trade patterns of the countries linked by trade relationships could occur this would lead to the increase of the transfers of energy and carbon embodied in traded commodities from developing countries and transition economies toward kyoto or eats constrained countries the aim of this paper is to verify if for italy as a kyoto and eats complying country evidence of a change in the trade patterns occurred on the basis of the pollution haven hypothesis does exist and to estimate the magnitude of the under estimation of the carbon actually emitted the carbon leakage the input output model has been used to calculate the intensities of energy consumption and the related green house gases emission for each italian economic sector

do increases in energy efficiency improve environmental quality and sustainability governments world wide increasingly see energy efficiency as an important aspect of sustainability however there is a debate in the literature as to whether the impact of improved energy efficiency on reducing energy use might be partially or more than wholly offset through rebound and backfire effects this paper clarifies the theoretical conditions under which such effects would occur and explores their likely significance using a computable general equilibrium cge model of the scottish economy we find that for scotland a general improvement in energy efficiency in the production sectors of the economy initially produces rebound effects that eventually grow into backfire energy use ultimately increases in response to an efficiency gain and the ratio of gdp to co2 emissions falls the economic factors underpinning rebound effects are straightforward energy efficiency improvements result in an effective cut in energy prices which produces output substitution competitiveness and income effects that stimulate energy demands however the presence of strong rebound or even backfire does not mean that efficiency enhancing policies are irrelevant rather it suggests that such policies operating alone are insufficient to generate environmental improvements the implication is that a co ordinated portfolio of energy policies is required

the economics of distributed energy generation a literature review the uk electricity system is likely to face dramatic technical and institutional changes in the near future current uk energy policy focuses on the need for a clean affordable and secure energy supply decentralisation of the electricity system is recognised as one means of achieving efficient and renewable energy provision as well as addressing concerns over ageing electricity infrastructure and capacity constraints in this paper we provide a critical literature review of the economics of increased penetration of distributed energy generation we find that there exists a large volume of research considering the financial viability of individual distributed generation technologies and we are necessarily selective in our review of these studies given the wide variety of technologies that the definition of distributed generation encompasses however there are few studies that focus on the pure economics of individual or groups of distributed energy generators and even fewer still based on the economy wide aspects of distributed generation in view of this gap in the literature we provide suggestions for future research which are likely to be necessary in order adequately to inform public policy on distributed generation and its role in the future of uk energy supply

a note on the theory of the firm under multiple uncertainties abstract we develop a dynamic continuous time theory of the competitive firm under multiple correlated uncertainties output price uncertainty and output uncertainty as an example in doing so we completely generalize and extend the previous one period comparative statics results the marginal impact of each parameter on optimal output particularly we relax the assumption of the statistical independence between the risks and the restrictions on the coefficient of absolute relative risk aversion furthermore we generally show the impact of one risk on the aversion to another moreover we show the role of the factor of correlation between risks on the decisions of the firm

carbon emissions embodied in value added chains in china abstract the literature on carbon leakage and embodied carbon in regional trade is extensive however many studies are primarily concerned with emissions embodied in demand supply chains and ignore the issue of carbon transfer behind the value added chains we promote a model to calculate value based emissions vbes and carbon emissions embodied in the value added chain using the multi regional input output model mrio taking china as an example vbes and carbon emissions embodied in value added chains at the sub national level based on mrio tables for 1997 and 2007 in china were analyzed transferred carbon emissions embodied in regional value added chains in china showed rapid growth between 1997 and 2007 however the absolute values of inter regional net transferred carbon emissions embodied in value added chains were small and showed a declining trend therefore the regional inequality between economic growth and carbon emissions pollution reduced between 1997 and 2007 although the amount of emissions embodied in regional value added chains increased as of the inter regional economic link in china gained close proximity

on the optimal level of a small country s strategic petroleum reserve abstract decisions relating to a country s strategic petroleum reserve must take into account the level of risk inherent in its petroleum imports the cost resulting from any shortfall in the import level the cost of storage and finally the effects of stockpiling transactions on the sensitive spot oil markets of course small countries need not take into account their effect on the global market a fact that drastically simplifies their decision problem we present such a simple decision model for a small country s petroleum reserve which in addition to the above factors take into account the uncertainty of the country s refining capacity a complete analytical treatment is feasible for this model and a specific numerical example is presented for the case of greece

examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis in recent years there have been a number of attempts to develop a more comprehensive approach to the issue of measuring resource use and or pollution generation embodied in trade flows including contributions that combine input output techniques and ecological footprint analysis in this two part paper we describe how to enumerate the resource and or pollution content of inter regional and inter national trade flows part 1 and we present a literature review of recent methodological and empirical developments part 2 it is straightforward in principle to extend the basic input output approach to capture international trade flows however in practice problems of data availability and compatibility and of computability of extended input output matrices mean that simplifying assumptions are generally applied but with the implications of these assumptions often not made fully explicit what appears to be absent from previous applications is an account of the analytical method by which ecological footprints should ideally be estimated in an international input output accounting analysis this allows an explicit analysis of the problems that prevent the application of the full method and identification of the most appropriate short cut methods in a transparent way the objective of this paper is to provide such an account

responsibility for regional waste generation a single region extended input output analysis for wales this paper uses a regional input output framework and data derived on waste generation by industry to examine different aspects of regional waste accountability in addition to estimating a series of industry output waste coefficients the paper considers a series of methods for waste attribution from production and consumption perspectives in particular it considers a method that permits a greater focus on regional private and public final consumption as the main exogenous driver of waste generation in doing so it uses a domestic technology assumption to consider a regional waste footprint where local consumption requirements are assumed to be met using production technologies over which regional authorities are likely to have more control

how organizational resources affect strategic change and performance in turbulent environments theory and evidence this study examines how historical resource endowments and competencies affect strategic change and its outcomes amid environmental turbulence drawing from both behavioral and economics based literatures we develop four distinct perspectives regarding the likely effect of resources on strategic change these four perspectives offer alternative predictions about how and why resource endowments should affect the likelihood or magnitude of strategic change and how and why they should moderate the relation between strategic change and performance we examine the predictive power of these four alternative arguments using extensive longitudinal data from a single industry context characterized both by substantial resource heterogeneity and environmental turbulence results indicate that organizations possessing greater stocks of historically valuable resources were much less likely to engage in adaptive strategic change but also that this resource driven disinclination towards change tended to have a benign or even beneficial effect on performance we discuss the implications of our theory and findings for the strategic change literature and also for the literature on the resource based view of the firm

innovations in regional computable general equilibrium cge modelling with the emergence of regional computable general equilibrium cge models in the later 1980s there was significant optimism that they would greatly push economic policy and the empirical envelopes unlike partial equilibrium approaches or input output methods cge models can trace the impact of an economic shock or policy shock through the various sectors allowing estimates of changes in factors output and prices however many of the first generation of cge models had a black box feel to them their results could be sensitive to the functional form parameter estimates and assumptions about capital and labour flows for example in their survey article partridge and rickman 1998 11 partridge m d and rickman d s 1998 regional computable general equilibrium modeling a survey and critical appraisal international regional science review 21 205 250 crossref web of science csa view all references called on cge modellers to account for these problems and strive to produce more credible results in recent years regional cge modellers have improved their approaches producing innovative techniques to apply to real world problems

portfolio optimization under loss aversion abstract we present an integrated methodological approach for selecting portfolios the proposed methodology is focused on incorporation of investor s preferences in the mean risk framework we propose a risk measure calculated with the downside part of the portfolio return distribution which we argue captures better the practical behavior of the loss averse investor we establish its properties study the link with stochastic dominance criteria point out the relations with conditional value at risk and lower partial moment of first order and give the explicit formula for the case of scenario based portfolio optimization the proposed methodology involves two stages firstly the investment opportunity set efficient frontier is determined and secondly one single preferred efficient portfolio is selected namely the one having the highest expected utility value three classes of utility functions with loss aversion corresponding to three types of investors are considered the empirical study is targeted on assessing the differences between the efficient frontier of the proposed model and the classical mean variance mean cvar and mean lpm1 frontiers we firstly analyze the loss of welfare incurred by using another model instead of the proposed one and measure the corresponding gain loss of utility secondly we assess how much the portfolios really differ in terms of their compositions using a dissimilarity index based on the 1 norm we describe and interpret the optimal solutions obtained and emphasize the role and influence of loss aversion parameters values and of constraints three types of constraints are studied no short selling allowed a certain degree of diversification imposed and short selling allowed

the co2 trade balance between scotland and the rest of the uk performing a multi region environmental input output analysis with limited data in this paper we attempt an empirical application of the multi region input output mrio method proposed by turner lenzen wiedmann and barrett turner k lenzen m wiedmann t barrett j 2007 examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis ecological economics 62 1 37 44 in a recent issue of this journal in order to enumerate the co2 pollution content of interregional trade flows between scotland and the rest of the uk ruk we extend the analysis to account for direct emissions generation by households as final consumers and to a social accounting matrix sam where a more comprehensive account of incomes and expenditures is possible while the existence of significant data problems mean that the quantitative results of this study should be regarded as provisional the interregional economy environment io and sam framework for scotland and ruk allows an illustrative analysis of some very important issues in terms of the nature and significance of interregional environmental spillovers within the uk and the existence of a co2 trade balance between scotland and ruk

energy modeling for policy studies energy policy modeling owes a great debt to the disciplines of operations research valuable modeling tools were available when the energy crisis struck unexpectedly in turn the immediate response to problem driven policy modeling produced methodological challenges and innovations that have application outside the domain of energy the early days of the explosive growth of energy modeling for policy studies provide illustrations of the interaction of problem identification model formulation problem analysis and policy implementation in the tradition of operations research

profit management of car rental companies abstract a car rental company consists of a fleet of available rentable vehicles waiting to be rented and being rented we model the company as a family of birth death processes bdps in equilibrium with finite size indexed by the company utilization parameter this metric is the ratio of the primary birth and death rates in these bdps relying on the basic concepts of company information and company entropy i e mean information we promote a procedure for profit management of car rental companies the company entropy represents the company uncertainty i e risk moreover finding optimal values of company utilization and fleet size leads to a unique management of that uncertainty introducing the coefficient of proportionality of a company as ratio of the renting revenue per vehicle per day and costs per vehicle per day we obtain an expression for the mean profit per day of a company i e profit attained per day from the average number of simultaneously rented vehicles as a function of company utilization fleet size and coefficient thus the profit management procedure reduces to finding optimal values of these three metrics as the key profit drivers of the rental business moreover an expression for the minimal value of the coefficient is introduced as a function of the other two metrics determining the zero mean profit per day thereby the efficiency of the company s fleet is determined as a reciprocal of this minimal value the developed procedure is illustrated on a company which is represented by the erlang loss system

embodied environmental damage in interregional trade a mrio based assessment within china abstract a new lifelong accountability system for ecological and environmental damage will be established for local officials in china however if this new production based accountability system does not consider the responsibilities of consumers it is likely to aggravate the imbalance of regional development using a multi regional input output model this paper tracked the environmental damage transfers in interprovincial trade trade related damage from four major pollutants was quantified for each province in 2007 the results show that nearly 45 of the environmental damage that occurs at home to meet consumption in other regions can be ascribed to the interprovincial trade flows in china in 2007 the north municipalities the east coast and the south coast where the share of production based environmental damage in relation to the local gdp is lower transferred environmental damage to the developing northwest and central regions to make the local gdp greener via interregional trade leading to inequality in regional development it is suggested that the importance of environmental damage from a consumer perspective should be integrated into the future implementation of the new lifelong accountability system

carbon emissions embodied in demand supply chains in china abstract using the multi regional input output model mrio the paper distinguishes the carbon emissions embodied in commodities for domestic final consumption cbes consumption based emissions and those for export ebes export based emissions and then calculates carbon emissions embodied in the demand supply chains for consumption and export based on technical coefficients matrix of the mrio for one country taking china as an example we provide a dynamic analysis of cbes ebes and carbon emissions embodied in consumption and export demand supply chains at the sub national level based on the mrio tables for 1997 and 2007 the results show that in china the transferred carbon emissions embodied in demand supply chains driven by consumption and export both showed rapid growth during 1997 2007 and the net transferred carbon emissions embodied in the demand supply chains showed an increasing trend as well less developed regions with abundant fossil fuels tend to net flow out carbon emissions

efficiency and effectiveness in the urban public transport sector a critical review with directions for future research abstract this paper proposes a self contained reference for both policy makers and scholars who want to address the problem of efficiency and effectiveness of local public transport lpt with special emphasis on urban transit in a sound empirical way framing economic efficiency studies into a transport planning perspective it offers a critical discussion of the existing empirical studies relating them to the main methodological approaches used the connection between such perspectives and operations research studies dealing with scheduling and tactical design of public transport services is also developed the comprehensive classification of selected relevant dimensions of the empirical literature namely inputs outputs kind of data analysed methods adopted and policy relevant questions addressed and the systematic investigation of their interrelationships allows us to summarise the existing literature and to propose desirable developments and extensions for future studies in the field

economics of devolution decentralization in the uk some questions and answers mcgregor p g and swales k 2005 economics of devolution decentralization in the uk some questions and answers regional studies 39 477 494 the paper explores the economic implications of the radical process of devolution decentralization and delegation of decision making and policy delivery initiated by the post 1997 uk labour government it is argued that the economies of all the presently devolved regions ultimately suffer if the barnett formula is rigorously imposed it is shown that the efficiency of devolving fiscal authority involves a balance of positive and negative elements depending on wage bargaining and migration responses it is then argued that delegation devolution of regional economic development policies while exploiting regional information advantages neglects regional economic interdependence so there are potential gains from greater cooperation coordination

economic structure and strategies for greenhouse gas mitigation abstract greenhouse gas ghg emission mitigation policy impacts the economic system directly in the short term by altering relative prices and indirectly in the long term by shifting the structure of the economy there may also be adjustments to economic structure independent of policy intervention due to changes in population consumption patterns and global markets the overall effectiveness of specific mitigation policy will partly depend on these indirect and exogenous changes to economic structure this study develops a new measure linking economic development with its environmental effects the technical cost of ghg mitigation under economic growth in an economy is calculated by combining traditional input output io analysis and a linear programming based sensitivity analysis the approach is applied to northern ireland ni producing an isoemission matrix that maps emission neutral expansion paths for the economy the measurement provides an indicator of the demand for technical improvement to achieve ghg mitigation at a national or regional level the flexibility and transparency of the approach make it useful for evaluating potential ghg mitigation strategies