Publication database

Diese Studie untersucht Trends in der Rekommunalisierung in der Entsorgungswirtschaft in Deutschland, analysiert mögliche Erklärungsansätze und überprüft diese empirisch. Wir finden Hinweise auf eine Rekommunalisierungsspirale: Kommunalisierung in der Vergangenheit verstärkt die Anreize für Kommunen zur Kommunalisierung in der Zukunft. Dies liegt, so unsere Vermutung, zum einen an „Ausstrahlwirkungen“ von benachbarten Kommunen, zum anderen an der sinkenden kommerziellen Attraktivität privater Angebote in einem schrumpfenden Wettbewerbsmarkt. Damit können von der Option der kommunalen Eigenerstellung wettbewerbliche Effekte ausgehen. Auf Basis der empirischen Ergebnisse schlägt diese Studie einen Test vor, ob Kommunen die Möglichkeit und den Anreiz zur Rekommunalisierung haben, um zu prüfen, ob die Option der kommunalen Eigenerstellung wettbewerbliche Effekte haben kann.

We study a contract change for tea pluckers on an Indian plantation, with a higher government-stipulated baseline wage. Incentive piece rates were lowered or kept unchanged. Yet, in the following month, output increased by 20 to 80 percent. This response contradicts the standard model and several variants, is only partly explicable by greater supervision, and appears to be "behavioral." But in subsequent months, the increase is comprehensively reversed. Though not an unequivocal indictment of "behavioral" models, these findings suggest that nonstandard responses may be ephemeral, and should ideally be tracked over an extended period of time.

Copyright © 2016 by the American Economic Association.

Postgrant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring postgrant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are caught up in patent thickets. Using data on opposition to patents at the European Patent Office we show that opposition decreases in fields in which many others profit from patent revocations. Moreover, in fields with a large number of mutually blocking patents, the incidence of opposition is sharply reduced, particularly among large firms and firms that are caught up directly in patent thickets. These findings indicate that postgrant patent review may not constitute an effective correction device for erroneous patent grants in technologies affected by either patent thickets or highly dispersed patent ownership.

© 2016 INFORMS

Patent-based measures are frequently used as indicators in empirical research on innovation and technological change. Currently, there is little evidence as to what extent patent-based indicators relate to product market outcomes. Using a unique dataset that links outcomes from product commercialization in the pharmaceutical industry with detailed patent data, we relate patent-based indicators that capture either an invention’s value or the uncertainty surrounding the patenting process to the outcomes of the product development process. Our findings suggest that the speed of commercialization increases with value but reduces with uncertainty. Using a variety of alternative indicators we derive implications for the use and the proper interpretation of individual measures. Moreover, our study has broader implications as it highlights the detrimental effect of uncertainty on the speed of innovation.

With permission of Elsevier

Zum Werk Businessplanung ist ein essentieller Bestandteil vor, bei und nach der Gründung eines Unternehmens. Selbst nach Etablierung eines Unternehmens sollte ein kontinuierlicher Planungsprozess und damit die Konkretisierung und Quantifizierung von Unternehmenszielen beibehalten werden. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Businessplanung von jungen Unternehmen. Hier ist der Planungsbedarf am größten aber auch zugleich am schwierigsten zu gestalten. Um eine solide Informationsgrundlage für (potenzielle und tatsächliche) Gründer und Jungunternehmer zu haben, werden im vorliegenden Buch die relevanten Bereiche einer adäquaten Geschäftsplanung dargestellt und erläutert. Vorteile auf einen Blick - Schritt für Schritt zum perfekten Businessplan - praxisorientiert und sofort umsetzbar - Tipps für die überzeugende Präsentation vor Investoren und Bankern Zielgruppe Für Existenzgründer und Unternehmer

The LeChatelier-Samuelson principle states that as a reaction to a shock, an agent's short-run adjustment of an action is smaller than the long-run adjustment of that action when the other related actions can also be adjusted. We extend the principle to strategic environments and define long run as an adjustment that also includes other players adjusting their strategies. We show that the principle holds for both idiosyncratic shocks (affecting only one player's action directly) and common shocks in supermodular games, only for idiosyncratic shocks in submodular games if the players' payoffs depend only on their own strategies and the sum of the rivals' strategies (for example, homogeneous Cournot oligopoly), and only for idiosyncratic shocks in other games of strategic substitutes or heterogeneity satisfying Morishima Conditions. We argue that the principle might also explain the empirical findings of overshifting of cost and unit tax by multiproduct firms.

Feed-in-tariff (FIT) policies aim at driving down the cost of renewable energies by fostering learning and accelerating the diffusion of green technologies. Under FIT mechanisms, governments purchase green energy at tariffs that are set above market price. The success or failure of FIT policies, in turn, critically depend on how these tariffs are determined and adjusted over time. This paper provides insights into designing cost-efficient and socially-optimal FIT programs. Our modeling framework captures key market dynamics as well as investors' strategic behavior. In this framework, we establish that the current practice of maintaining constant profitability is theoretically rarely optimal. By contrast, we characterize a no-delay region in the problem's parameters, such that profitability should strictly decrease over time if the diffusion and learning rates belong to this region. In this case, investors never strategically postpone their investment to a later period. When the diffusion and learning rates fall outside the region, profitability should increase at least temporarily over some time periods and strategic delays occur. The presence of strategic delays, however, makes the practical problem of computing optimal FIT schedules very difficult. To address this issue, the regulator may focus on policies that disincentivize investors to postpone their investment. With this additional constraint, a constant profitability policy is optimal if and only if the diffusion and learning rates fall outside the no-delay region. This provides partial justifications for current FIT implementations.

© 2015 INFORMS