the real exchange rate conundrum the case of central america abstract this paper evaluates alternative measures of the real exchange rate for mexico and central american countries bilateral and multilateral real exchange rates using the consumer price index wholesale price index and gross domestic product deflator are calculated there are often significant differences between the bilateral and multilateral measures of the real exchange rate real exchange rates based on consumer price indexes and gross domestic product deflators were found to be more closely related to each other than either one was to the wholesale price index

tipping and concentration in markets with indirect network effects this paper develops a framework for measuring tipping the increase in a firm s market share dominance caused by indirect network effects our measure compares the expected concentration in a market to the hypothetical expected concentration that would arise in the absence of indirect network effects in practice this measure requires a model that can predict the counterfactual market concentration under different parameter values capturing the strength of indirect network effects we build such a model for the case of dynamic standards competition in a market characterized by the classic hardware software paradigm to demonstrate its applicability we calibrate it using demand estimates and other data from the 32 64 bit generation of video game consoles a canonical example of standards competition with indirect network effects in our example we find that indirect network effects can lead to a strong economically significant increase in market concentration we also find important roles for beliefs on both the demand side as consumers tend to pick the product they expect to win the standards war and on the supply side as firms engage in penetration pricing to invest in growing their networks

exploring the potential for energy conservation in french households through hybrid modeling although the building sector is recognized as having major potential for energy conservation and carbon dioxide emissions mitigation conventional bottom up and top down models are limited in their ability to capture the complex economic and technological dynamics of the sector this paper introduces a hybrid framework developed to assess future household energy demand in france res irf a bottom up module of energy consumption for space heating has several distinctive features i a clear separation between energy efficiency i e investment in energy efficient technologies and sufficiency i e changes in the utilization of energy consuming durables which allows the rebound effect to be assessed ii the inclusion of barriers to energy efficiency in the form of intangible costs consumer heterogeneity parameters and the learning by doing process iii an endogenous determination of retrofitting which represents trade offs between retrofit quantity and quality subsequently res irf is linked to the imaclim r computable general equilibrium model this exercise shows that compared to a 37 reduction in final energy demand achievable in business as usual in existing dwellings an additional reduction of 14 could be achieved if relevant barriers to efficiency and sufficiency were overcome

purchasing power parity in the long run a cointegration approach this paper utilizes cointegration analysis to examine purchasing power parity relationships over a long time horizon the results indicate that the exchange rate is cointegrated strongly with the wholesale price index ratio and somewhat weakly with the consumer price index ratio the cointegrating coefficient between the exchange rate and the price ratio is close to one when cointegration is confirmed the hypothesis that the real exchange rate follows a random walk is rejected in most cases finally a new test for common trends finds no such common trends in exchange rates or price ratios copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

applications barriers to entry and exclusive vertical contracts in platform markets i introduction exclusive contracts in vertical relationships feature prominently in antitrust cases in network industries at issue are contracts a firm with market power signs with its suppliers or buyers that may limit access to the market by its rivals we focus on the case in which the firm signs exclusive contracts with upstream suppliers for example in the 1980s developers of games for nintendo s video game console agreed not to provide any titles for other platforms atari v nintendo 1 in u s v microsoft the dominant software provider was charged with abusing its monopoly power in its contracts with internet content providers and independent software developers with the goal of excluding competitors to microsoft s internet explorer browser 2 exclusive contracts such as these are an example of vertical restraints an area in law and economics that has generated as much controversy as any we examine the impacts of exclusionary contracts between hardware manufacturers and software providers in the home video game market an important feature of the market for video game consoles is indirect network effects katz and shapiro 1985 whereby the consumer valuation of the primary product the console or platform increases with the number of complementary goods available gaming software if platform providers enjoy indirect network effects then each may want to prevent suppliers of its complementary good from also supplying competing platforms evans 2003 regibeau 2004 when a dominant platform provider and the producers of the complementary goods sign such exclusionary contracts they burden competing platforms and potential challengers with producing the complementary goods themselves or finding alternative suppliers which may raise rivals costs and can diminish competition brennan 2007 this is the applications barrier to entry at issue in the microsoft case foreclosure of competitors can result armstrong and wright 2007 whether survival of a single dominant platform is inefficient or to the detriment of consumers depends on the size of duplicated costs among platforms the heterogeneity of consumers preferences among platforms and among the complementary goods and other factors we focus on estimating determining the causes of and exploring the implications of indirect network effects for exclusively and nonexclusively provided games exclusive titles are those games that can only be played on one system because the console producer either created the game itself or negotiated an exclusive contract with a video game maker we examine the sixth generation videogame console market which comprises nintendo s gamecube sony s playstation2 and microsoft s xbox and uncover an interesting finding although we find strong indirect network effects and a large impact of exclusivity on rivals console demand when most games are nonexclusive the marginal exclusive game contributes virtually nothing to console demand exclusivity helps a firm establish market share at first but beyond a certain point additional locking up of software supply no longer hurts rivals consequently there is no ability to capture ever more console consumers through locking in an increasing supply of exclusive games such capture of the whole market is often assumed in discussion or derived in theoretical models of the video game industry in specific or platform markets in general by itself a finding that exclusivity does not affect console demand on the margin does not necessarily imply that there is no consumer harm for with heterogeneous game quality it may be that a console maker need only lock in the best games to harm the rivals ability to compete however our investigation suggests that exclusionary contracts did not hurt consumers because of two important features of the videogame market the bargaining power enjoyed by the best software providers coupled with the existence of blockbuster games that enable competitors to establish market share prevents the foreclosure of rivals through exclusive contracting suggested by some models armstrong and wright 2007

the economics of two sided markets at a local best buy a child places a new sony playstation 3 on the cashier s counter while the parents dig out their visa card the gaming system and the payment card may appear to have little connection other than this purchase however these two items share an important characteristic that is generating a series of economic insights and has important implications for strategic decision making and economic policymaking both video game systems and payment cards are examples of two sided markets broadly speaking a two sided market is one in which 1 two sets of agents interact through an intermediary or platform and 2 the decisions of each set of agents affects the outcomes of the other set of agents typically through an externality in the case of a video game system the intermediary is the console producer sony in the scenario above while the two sets of agents are consumers and video game developers neither consumers nor game developers will be interested in the playstation if the other party is not similarly a successful payment card requires both consumer usage and merchant acceptance where both consumers and merchants value each others participation many more products fit into this paradigm such as search engines newspapers and almost any advertisersupported media examples in which consumers often negatively value rather than positively value the participation of the other side as well as most software or title based operating systems and consumer electronics malls which seek retailers and consumers convention organizers which seek buyers and sellers dating services which seek men and women and the journal of economic perspectives which seeks content and readership all experience the economics of two sided markets the multi sided nature of many internet and high technology markets as well as

energy consumption real income and temporal causality results from a multi country study based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques abstract unlike previous studies on the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth this paper illustrates how the finding of cointegration i e long term equilibrium relationship between these variables may be used in testing granger causality based on the most recent johansen s multivariate cointegration tests preceded by various unit root or non stationarity tests we test for cointegration between total energy consumption and real income of six asian economies india pakistan malaysia singapore indonesia and the philippines non rejection of cointegration between variables rules out granger non causality and imples at least one way of granger causality either unidirectional or bidirectionial secondly by using a dynamic vector error correction model we then analyse the direction of granger causation and hence the within sample granger exogeneity or endogeneity of each of the variables thirdly the relative strength of the causality is gauged through the dynamic variance decomposition technique by decomposing the total impact of an unanticipated shock to each of the variables beyond the sample period into proportions attributable to shocks in the other variables including its own in the bivariate system results based on these tools of methodology indicate that while all pair wise relationships shared common univariate integrational properties only relationships for three countries india pakistan and indonesia were cointegrated for these countries temporal causality results were mixed with unidirectional causality from energy to income for india exactly the reverse for indonesia and mutual causality for pakistan the vdcs were not inconsistent with these results and provided us with an additional insight as to the relatively more dominant direction of causation in pakistan simple bivariate vector autoregressive models for the three non cointegrated systems did not indicate any direction of causality significantly in either direction

standardization and the stability of collusion we characterize the interplay between firms decision in terms of product standardization and the nature of their ensuing market behaviour we prove the existence of a nonmonotone relationship between firms decision at the product stage and their intertemporal preferences c 1998 elsevier science s a

hedonic price indexes for spreadsheets and an empirical test for network externalities in this article i first estimate hedonic price equations for computer spreadsheet programs and then use the analysis to empirically test whether network externalities exist in this industry the study shows that consumers are willing to pay a significant premium for spreadsheets that are compatible with the lotus platform and for spreadsheets that offer links to external databases and a similar premium for spreadsheets that offer local area network externalities finally the quality adjusted real price of computer spreadsheets declined by approximately 15 per year from 1986 to 1991

complementarity coordination and compatibility the role of fixed costs in the economics of systems abstract we analyze industry equilibrium and incentive to compatibility when goods produced by different producers generate utility only when consumed as component parts of a system we assume the presence of two systems each composed of some basic component and a set of differentiated complementary products the combination of complementarity between the two components of the system and of fixed costs in the production of the complementary product results in a form of network effect we focus on the role played by the size of the fixed costs in the production of the complementary products in determining the size of this system effect and by this means the structure and types of equilibria that may be observed monopolistic or duopolistic symmetric or asymmetric we also highlight the consequence of the same fixed costs for the private and social incentives to render the systems compatible

estimating energy conservation potential in china s energy intensive industries with rebound effect abstract the energy consumption of china s six most energy intensive sub industries is about half of the total national energy consumption and accounts for more than 70 of industrial energy consumption in recent years these six industries are capital and energy intensive and have a great impact on the energy consumption of china so they are directly related to the achievement of the energy conservation goal in the 13th five year plan this paper investigates the influential factors of energy consumption in the industries by employing the cointegration method and estimates the possible energy conservation potential considering energy rebound effect the results show that gdp and the scale of industries are the deterministic factors increasing energy consumption while r d intensity decreases it energy price has little impact on energy consumption the average energy rebound effect is calculated using the latent variable approach and the result is 90 75 considering energy rebound effect the energy conservation potential of china s energy intensive industries is 14 18 26 54 million tons of standard coal equivalent in 2020 and 44 64 80 72 million tons of standard coal equivalent in 2030

energy and national income in korea further evidence on the role of omitted variables abstract results of this paper indicate that the real oil price is a major determinant of real national income and energy consumption the combined effects of real money and real government expenditure on real income and energy consumption are also substantial a lack of causality or the causality between energy and real income in prior studies is due to the omitted variables results also confirm that the two oil price shocks combined adversely affected real national income

diffusion of a new product under network effects the us dvd market we formulate a model that captures the inter dependence between hardware demand and software supply indirect network effect in the dvd industry the identification of the network effect comes from the difference in software availability across two different formats vhs and dvd we find that a 1 increase in the number of dvd titles raises the demand for dvd players by 0 87 simultaneously a 1 increase in video player ownership leads to a 0 14 increase in the variety of video titles our simulations show that hardware manufacturers might be able to internalize the network externality to increase total industry revenues

adoptions and orphans in the early microcomputer market in this paper we examine the development of the microcomputer market in the early 1980s cp m a widely adopted operating system was orphaned by the user and the development communities a new operating system dos and a new hardware platform the ibm pc became the predominant industry standard we examine the statistical relationship between data that reflects hardware and software sales for the competing platforms we conclude that the economic processes underlying the development of dos differed from those underlying cp m and that many of these differences related to the role of software development

compatibility standardization and network effects some policy implications given the dramatic growth of the internet and information technology industries in general and the importance of interconnection in these networks the economics of compatibility and standardization has become mainstream economics in this paper i examine several key policy aspects of standard setting in industries with network effects copyright 2002 oxford university press

how does incompatibility affect prices evidence from atm s if consumers value mix and match combinations of network complements incompatibility between different sellers components should affect prices in atm markets a 1996 governance change exogenously generated such incompatibility by allowing banks to impose surcharges when other banks deposit customers use their atm s in our data incompatibility makes the relationship between deposit account pricing and own atm s more positive and makes the relationship between deposit account pricing and competitors atm s more negative the level effect on prices is positive the pattern of results is more pronounced in high population density markets where customers may care more about atm s

complementary goods creating capturing and competing for value this paper studies the strategic interaction between firms producing strictly complementary products with strict complements a consumer derives positive utility only when both products are used together we show that value capture and value creation problems arise when such products are developed and sold by separate firms nonintegrated producers although the firms tend to price higher for given quality levels their provision of quality is so low that in equilibrium prices are set well below what an integrated monopolist would choose when one firm can mandate a royalty fee from the complementor producer as often occurs in arrangements between hardware and software makers we find that the value capture problem is mitigated to some extent and consumer surplus rises however because royalty fees greatly reduce the incentives of the firm paying them to invest in quality the arrangement exacerbates the value creation problem and leads to even lower total quality surprisingly this result can reverse with competition specifically when the firm charging the royalty fee faces a vertically differentiated competitor the value creation problem is greatly reduced opening the door for the possibility of a pareto improving outcome in which all firms and consumers benefit it is worth noting that this outcome cannot be achieved by giving firms the option of introducing a line of product variants competition serves as a necessary commitment ingredient

a co integration analysis of the price and income elasticities of energy demand in turkish agriculture abstract agriculture has an important role in every country s development particularly the contribution of agriculture to development and competitiveness is increasing with agricultural productivity growth productivity in turn is closely associated with direct and indirect use of energy as an input therefore the importance of energy in agriculture cannot be denied as one of the basic inputs to the economic growth process following the importance of energy in turkish agriculture this study aims to estimate the long and short run relationship of energy consumption agricultural gdp and energy prices via co integration and error correction ecm analysis annual data from 1970 to 2008 for diesel and electricity consumptions are utilized to estimate long run and short run elasticities according to ecm analysis for the diesel demand model the long run income and price elasticities were calculated as 1 47 and 0 38 respectively for the electricity demand model income and price elasticities were calculated at 0 19 and 0 72 respectively in the long run briefly in turkey support for energy use in agriculture should be continued in order to ensure sustainability in agriculture increase competitiveness in international markets and balance farmers income

optimal policy and network effects for the deployment of zero emission vehicles abstract we analyze the impact of indirect network effects in the deployment of zero emission vehicles in a static partial equilibrium model in most theoretical analyses direct and indirect effects are conflated and relatively few authors have explicitly considered indirect network effects we also introduce the market power of vehicle producers and scale effects in the production function the model exhibits a multiplicity of local social critical points and market equilibria suggesting a possibility of lock in the optimal two subsidies for vehicles and stations are derived so that the pareto dominating market equilibrium would coincide with the social optimum configurations associated with different values of the parameters are explored to revisit the policy issues at various stages of deployment of hydrogen and battery electric vehicles

energy gdp relationship revisited an example from gcc countries using panel causality abstract this work investigates the causality relationship between gross domestic product gdp and energy consumption in the six countries of the gulf cooperation council gcc recently developed panel cointegration and causality techniques are used to uncover the direction of energy gdp causality in the gcc empirical results indicate a unidirectional causality running from gdp to energy consumption evidence shows no support for the hypothesis that energy consumption is the source of gdp growth in the gcc countries such results suggest that energy conservation policies may be adopted without much concern about their adverse effects on the growth of gcc economies

estimates of electricity saving potential in chinese nonferrous metals industry the paper analyzes the electricity saving potential of nonferrous metals industry in china the cointegration method is applied to estimate electricity intensity of chinese nonferrous metals industry in an effort to predict future electricity saving potential the results show that there is a long run equilibrium between electricity intensity and factors such as r d intensity industrial electricity price enterprise scale and labor productivity by means of scenario analysis we evaluate different possible measures that might be adopted to narrow down the electricity efficiency gap between nonferrous metals industry in china and that of japan the results indicate that more active electricity conservation policies are needed in order to reduce the electricity intensity of chinese nonferrous metals industry we also find that the electricity efficiency gap could be significantly narrowed by 2020 if proper electricity conservation policy is adopted finally based on the results of the scenario analysis future policy priorities are suggested

a plant specific bottom up approach for assessing the cost effective energy conservation potential and its ability to compensate rising energy related costs in the german iron and steel industry abstract germany produces more steel than any other european country 42 7 mt steel in 2012 the steel production accounts for 22 of germany s final industrial energy consumption we assessed the potential of 32 identified energy conservation measures by deriving fuel electricity and co2 conservation cost curves we developed a methodology which respects the current efficiency of individual plants and two different system boundaries a process boundary for benchmarking measures and a facility boundary for calculating the total energy conservation potential with moderate electricity and carbon price developments for the investigation period 2013 2035 the cost effective conservation potentials are estimated to be 11 7 for fuel 2 2 for electricity and 12 2 for fuel and process related co2 emissions compared to the industry s final energy use and co2 emissions in 2012 for the sensitivity analysis we varied electricity and carbon prices and our results showed that adopting cost effective energy conservation measures can compensate for rising energy prices but the extent differs between the production routes while the eaf route could compensate up to 50 higher electricity prices the options for the bf bof route to reduce the fossil fuel consumption are limited thus the energy related production costs of the bf bof route increased in average by 6 13 between 2013 and 2035

comments on using latent variable approach to estimate china s economy wide energy rebound effect over 1954 2010 by shuai shao tao huang and lili yang abstract in a recent article shao et al 2014 formulate economy wide energy rebound effect based on the ipat equation and employ latent variable approach for estimation we argue that their formulation should be revised and advocate the distinguishment between energy efficiency improvement and technological progress for estimating energy rebound effect an application to estimate china s energy rebound effect over 1981 2011 is also provided

complementary network externalities and technological adoption abstract we address the adoption of technology when there are network externalities and networks are characterized by complementary products produced by different firms we show that when the software firms are bertrand competitors a hardware technology with lower software development costs is adopted for many parameter values for which it is socially optimal to adopt the other technology the over adoption is due to a discrepancy between the private and social benefit of having a larger network

differentiated networks equilibrium and efficiency we consider a model of price competition in a duopoly with product differentiation and network effects the value of a good for a consumer is the sum of a common and an idiosyncratic component the first captures the vertical dimension of quality the second captures horizontal differentiation each consumer privately observes his own value for each good but cannot separate the common and the idiosyncratic component therefore he has incomplete information about the value of the goods for the other consumers after firms announce prices consumers choose simultaneously which network to join facing a coordination problem in the efficient allocation both networks are active and the firm with the highest expected quality has the largest market share to characterize the equilibrium allocation we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for uniqueness of the equilibrium of the coordination game played by consumers for given prices the equilibrium allocation differs from the efficient one for two reasons first the equilibrium allocation of consumers to the networks is too balanced since consumers fail to internalize network externalities second if access to the networks is priced by strategic firms then the product with the highest expected quality is also the most expensive this further reduces the asymmetry between market shares and therefore social welfare

the pattern of agricultural price distortions in central and eastern europe abstract nominal and adjusted protection rates for nine agricultural commodities in seven central european and three baltic states are estimated for the transition period 1990 1995 our estimates indicate that agricultural and food price distortions differ strongly between central and east european countries between commodities and varied over time the average level of price distortions decreased in 1991 and 1992 after price and trade liberalization but increased again in 1993 as many of these countries reintroduced protectionist price and trade policy measures since 1994 the average level of price distortions has declined again accounting for exchange rate policy effects further reduces estimates of protection of agricultural producers

monetary and exchange rate policies for international financial stability a proposal w v ithout a common monetary standard the remarkable integration of western european north american and the industrialized asian economies in both commodity trade and financial flows is less efficient and becoming untenable dissatisfaction with wildly fluctuating relative currency values euphemistically called floating or flexible exchange rates is a prime cause of the resurgence in protectionism in 1986 87 the overvalued yen forced japanese industrialists to close factories retire workers and write off once valuable investments in plant and equipment this parallels what their american counterparts were forced to do between 1981 and 1985 when the dollar suddenly became overvalued similarly the paring down of the british manufacturing base was precipitated when the pound unexpectedly became a strong petrocurrency in 1979 81 in agriculture japan and european countries are determined to insulate their domestic prices of farm products from unsettling international influences including volatile fluctuations in the yen dollar or mark dollar exchange rates thus unless exchange stability is first achieved the american government s attempt to broaden the general agreement on tariffs and trade to encompass agriculture and services is likely to fail but what keeps the three major industrial blocs from developing a common monetary standard to prevent exchange rate fluctuations although many people

strategic incompatibility in atm markets abstract we test whether firms use incompatibility strategically using data from atm markets high atm fees degrade the value of competitors deposit accounts and can in principle serve as a mechanism for siphoning depositors away from competitors or for creating deposit account differentiation our empirical framework can empirically distinguish surcharging motivated by this strategic concern from surcharging that simply maximizes atm profit considered as a stand alone operation the results are consistent with such behavior by large banks but not by small banks for large banks the effect of incompatibility seems to operate through higher deposit account fees rather than increased deposit account base

energy consumption for space heating a discrete continuous approach energy demand for space heating is estimated using a discrete continuous choice model which focuses on the relationship between the choice of heating equipment and energy consumption the model is estimated on norwegian micro data and the two stages of the model are estimated simultaneously the capital cost and the operating cost of the heating systems are both found to have a significant impact on the choice of heating system furthermore the results show that household characteristics are important variables in residential energy models energy price elasticities and income elasticities are also estimated

competition between networks a study of the market for yellow pages this paper estimates the importance of network effects in the market for yellow pages i estimate three simultaneous equations consumer demand for usage of a directory advertiser demand for advertising and a publisher s first order condition derived from profit maximizing behaviour estimation shows that advertisers value consumer usage and that consumers value advertising implying a network effect i find that internalizing network effects would significantly increase surplus as an application i consider whether the market benefits from monopoly which takes advantage of network effects or oligopoly which reduces market power i find that a more competitive market is preferable copyright 2004 wiley blackwell

estimating the rebound effect in us manufacturing energy consumption abstract the energy price shocks of the 1970s are usually assumed to have increased the search for new energy saving technologies where eventual gains in energy efficiencies will reduce the real per unit price of energy services and hence the consumption of energy will rise and partially offset the initial reduction in the usage of energy sources this is the rebound effect which is estimated for the us manufacturing sector using time series data applying the dynamic ols method dols when allowing for asymmetric price effects the rebound effect is found to be approximately 24 for the us manufacturing sector

trade policy reform and industrial sector growth in mexico 1960 1991 the purpose of this paper is to analyze how the mexican manufacturing sector was affected by changing trade regimes between 1960 and 1991 this short version of the paper focuses mainly on the trade liberalization of the last decade it also omits most tables and the discussion of the literature after a summary description of the policy regime changes it examines the resulting changes in the incentive structure focusing on the relationship between devaluation and protection then the paper analyzes manufacturing sector growth and structural changes in terms of demand sources the analysis is based on the following data rates of protection from ten kate and de mateo 1989a and 1989b the real exchange rate from fleissig and grennes 1994 and production and trade data from the national accounts inegi 1993 national financiera 1991 this study s conclusions are relevant for the timing and sequencing of future trade policy reforms

real exchange rate behavior and economic performance in ldcs in recent years policy discussions have included increasing references to real exchange rate rer stability and correct exchange rate alignment as crucial conditions to improve economic performance in less developed countries ldcs 1 evidence from latin american asian and african countries is often quoted to support the view that the link between rer behavior and economic performance is strong it is argued that while unstable rers inhibited export growth in some of latin america their stability was fundamental in promoting east asian expansion in many african countries on the other hand persistently misaligned local currencies harmed the development of agriculture reducing domestic food supply 2 but in spite of its importance no empirical work has been attempted either to test the relationship between rer behavior and performance indicators at a broad multicountry level or to investigate the sources of rer variability and misalignment in ldcs the theoretical literature on rer determinants has been recently surveyed by sebastian edwards 3 he distinguishes between equilibrium and disequilibrium rers and between external and domestic rer determinants although domestic policies are often said to account for significant rer variations empirical work has only concentrated on the effect of nominal devaluations4 or speculative crises arising from expansionary monetary policies in a system of fixed ex

electricity demand and conservation potential in the chinese nonmetallic mineral products industry newhuadu business school research fund ministry of education foundation 10jzd0018 10jbg013 china sustainable energy program g 1103 13921 national social science foundation 09zd050

intra industry trade and the variety of home products the authors provide a rigorous general equilibrium analysis of the welfare effects of international trade in the presence of differentiated home nontraded products as well as tradable products they extend the standard monopolisitic competition framework to incorporate differentiated nontraded products and demonstrate that in general the gains from trade proposition applies also to this framework however the authors also show that trade may reduce the variety of home products and thus abstracting from all sources of gains from trade other than variety effects they show that only in a very extreme case trade may make all countries worse off

network effects without network externalities abstract the network externalities hypothesis postulates that consumers prefer to purchase brands which are bought by more consumers compared with brands with a low market share in this paper we show that increasing returns to scale in the production of complementary products can substitute for the network externalities assumption we develop a model for the computer industry in which the production of complementary software requires a large fixed cost of development relative to the cost of duplicating and marketing the software the increasing returns to scale in the production of software yields consumers behavior which is very similar to consumers who have preferences exhibiting network externalities

open architecture and r d incentives in open systems firms give up their property rights to technologies and permit other companies to use these technologies we ask how an incumbent s architecture choice affects social welfare by altering r d competition among firms more specifically we ask whether an incumbent by adopting an open system can establish its socially inefficient technology as the market standard while an entrant is developing a more efficient technology it is shown that an incumbent has an incentive to preempt an entrant s competing technology by choosing an open system but that the open system might result in a premature market standard

competing technologies and market dominance standard battles in the local area networking industry the rise of fast ethernet as the dominant standard for high speed connection in the local area networking industry is chosen to study the interaction between increasing returns to adoption and technical change in innovation diffusion contrary to most of the empirical papers on diffusion with increasing returns which study competition between an entrenched technology and a new competitor the focus is on the case in which several and different versions of a new technology are competing at the same time for market dominance within this context this article studies under which conditions an early technology may fail to capitalise on its initial time advantage and a new version without a clear early lead may become dominant in particular we will consider a case in which the initial time advantage is made ineffective by consistently adverse technological expectations then we analyse how the arrival on the market of different categories of buyers sensitive to specific applications further contribute to weaken the early leader and strengthen a competing version this is more likely to occur when buyers are highly familiar with the characteristics of that specific version copyright 2008 oxford university press

platform competition with must have components in platform component systems with indirect network effects some must have components are so popular with consumers that they create large discrete indirect network effects when they become available on a platform for example espn is a must have component of cable tv platforms this paper examines how platform market structures determine exclusive versus non exclusive contracts between platforms and components it shows that a component provider is more likely to sign exclusive contracts with a single platform if its popularity is high the platform market share difference is large and cross platform indirect network effects are low

the rebound effect some empirical evidence from india abstract the present paper looks at the effect of technical efficiency gains on energy use in three sectors in india at varying levels of aggregation high positive rebound implies that efficient technology unless supplemented by appropriate pricing policy will not be successful in containing demand however the main purpose of the paper is to focus on the unique mechanism of rebound that may occur in developing countries with unmet demand

the impact of increased efficiency in the industrial use of energy a computable general equilibrium analysis for the united kingdom the conventional wisdom is that improving energy efficiency will lower energy use however there is an extensive debate in the energy economics policy literature concerning rebound effects these occur because an improvement in energy efficiency produces a fall in the effective price of energy services the response of the economic system to this price fall at least partially offsets the expected beneficial impact of the energy efficiency gain in this paper we use an economy energy environment computable general equilibrium cge model for the uk to measure the impact of a 5 across the board improvement in the efficiency of energy use in all production sectors we identify rebound effects of the order of 30 50 but no backfire no increase in energy use however these results are sensitive to the assumed structure of the labour market key production elasticities the time period under consideration and the mechanism through which increased government revenues are recycled back to the economy

hardware quality vs network size in the home video game industry abstract this paper analyzes competition between multiple proprietary and incompatible hardware systems when indirect network effects are present and software is provided competitively by third party developers a discrete choice demand structure is employed within a game theoretic setting to allow for a continuum of market share possibilities empirical evidence supports the claim that excess inertia is not a pervasive problem two data sets covering the life of the home video game industry yearly from 1976 to 2003 and monthly january 1995 to october 2007 yield three main results 1 market share is 11 4 times more sensitive to hardware quality than network size 2 the number of available games is 3 69 times more sensitive to hardware quality than network size and 3 hardware quality has a larger impact than network size on the probability of hardware success

integrated assessment of global climate change with learning by doing and energy related research and development this paper presents a small scale version of an integrated assessment model iam of global climate change which is based on a global regionally differentiated computable general equilibrium cge model with endogenous technological change this model can be viewed as a basic framework for analyzing a broad range of economic issues related to climate change in particular since technological change is represented in two ways on the one hand there is learning by doing lbd in non fossil energy supply technologies and on the other hand there is research and development r d driven energy saving technical progress in production computational experiments are added for illustrating the role of technological innovation in a world both with and without cooperation in the solution of the global climate problem

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

incentive policies and export performance in sub saharan africa abstract the paper presents the results of an econometric investigation which shows that exports in general and agricultural exports in particular are responsive to price incentives in sub saharan africa it is further shown that within sub saharan africa market oriented countries generally gained and interventionist countries lost export market shares the differences in export performance are even greater if comparisons are made between private market economies and etatist countries in a three fold classification scheme that puts some countries in an intermediate category

trade liberalization and economic stabilization in mexico lessons of experience abstract this article reviews the mexican trade liberalization of the past decade special attention is paid to the circumstances by which it was triggered to the macroeconomic environment and to the design of the process particularly the speed and extent of the trade reforms it is argued that although far reaching liberalization measures were carried out in a relatively short period of time the exposure of domestic industry to foreign competition was delayed considerably as a result of the exchange rate management during the process

the rebound effect for space heating empirical evidence from austria abstract the major focus of this paper is to investigate the magnitude of the rebound effect for space heating in austria different approaches are applied and compared the most important result of this investigation is that despite the fact that all approaches applied have their weaknesses and some results were not highly significant the final outcomes of the different approaches show quite good coincidence they provide evidence of a rebound effect between 20 and 30 the most important conclusions for energy policy makers are i standards with respect to building codes are very important tools to increase the thermal quality of new buildings ii due to prevailing low energy prices a triggering tool which may be rebates or loans has to be implemented to increase the efficiency of the building stock

energy efficiency fallacies revisited abstract a number of governments including that of the uk subscribe to the belief that a national program devoted to raising energy efficiency throughout the economy provides a costless indeed profitable route to meeting international environmental obligations this is a seductive policy it constitutes the proverbial free lunch not only avoiding politically unpopular measures like outlawing taxing or rationing offending fuels or expanding non carboniferous sources of energy like nuclear power but doing so with economic benefit the author of this contribution came to doubt the validity of this solution when it was offered as a way of mitigating the effect of the opec price hikes of the 1970 maintaining that economically justified improvement in energy efficiency led to higher levels of energy consumption at the economy wide level than in the absence of any efficiency response more fundamentally he argues that there is no case for preferentially singling out energy from among all the resources available to us for efficiency maximization the least damaging policy is to determine targets enact the restrictive measures needed to curb consumption and then leave it to consumers intermediate and final to reallocate all the resources available to them to best effect subject to the new enacted constraints and any others they might be experiencing there is no reason to suppose that it is right for all the economic adjustment following a new resource constraint to take the form of improvements in the productivity of that resource alone as many others have argued any action to impose resource constraint entails an inevitable economic cost in the shape of a reduction in production and consumption possibilities there would be no free lunch in the last few years debate about the validity of these contentions has blossomed especially under the influence of writers on the western side of the atlantic in this contribution the author outlines the original arguments for questioning whether raised efficiency leads to lower consumption reports more recent developments and offers some insights as food for further thought