Counterfeit pharmaceutical products are a real threat to the health of patients, and to the reputation and commercial success of legitimate producers of genuine products. NIR chemical imaging provides a rapid method for detecting and comparing suspected counterfeit products with no sample preparation. With appropriate choice of operating conditions, multiple samples can be compared simultaneous...

We consider a (not necessarily complete) continuous-time security market with semimartingale prices and general information filtration. In such a setting, we show that the first-order conditions for optimality of an agent maximizing a ‘smooth’ (but not necessarily additive) utility can be formulated as the martingale property of prices, after normalization by a ‘state-price’ process. The latter...

This article looks at the negative images on cash trades of in-game assets in Taiwan, through interview of participants in this activity, we believe the blurring of boundaries between work and play, adulthood and adolescence, real and virtual is what distinguishes this market from previous markets of virtual goods, resulting in its social stigma. We then discuss how the participants confront th...

In a static environment, optional participation and a local agglomeration of cooperators are found to be beneficial for the occurrence and maintenance of cooperation. In the optional public goods game, the rock-scissors-paper cycles of different strategies yield oscillatory cooperation but not stable cooperation. In this paper, by incorporating population density and individual mobility into th...

The global economy changed considerably in recent years with important consequences for central banking. During the last half of the previous century the world economy was characterised by a process of liberalisation, deregulation and eventually globalisation, i.e. a process through which an increasingly free flow of ideas, people, goods, services and capital leads to the integration of economi...

This paper develops a two-country general equilibrium model to examine the costs and benefits of trade in differentiated products. It focuses on how the relative ability in exporting variety determines the welfare of each country. While the analysis suggests a new rationale for export-promotion, it also shows the possibility of overprovision of export variety. It is shown that the variety of co...

Several explanations have been proposed in order to explain why, in public goods games, cooperation does not collapse. In these games free-riders enjoy the benefits of other individuals who contribute in benefit of a community. In the present work we address a public goods game where individuals have the choice between contributing to a sanctioning institution and to a sanction-free one. In the...

This paper studies the role of exchange policies as a price discrimination device in a sequential screening model with heterogeneous goods. In the rst period, agents are uncertain about their ordinal preferences over a set of horizontally di erentiated goods, but have private information about their intensity of preferences. In the second period, each individual privately learns his preferences...

This paper provides a political economy analysis of (de)centralization when local public goods—with spillovers effects—can be substitutes or complements. Depending on the degree of complementarity between local public goods, median voters strategically delegate policy to either ‘conservative’ or to ‘liberal’ representatives under decentralized decision-making. In the first case, it accentuates ...