global air pollution is a serious threat caused by excessive use of fossil fuels for transportation. despite the fact that diesel fuel is a big environmental pollutant as it contains different hydrocarbons, sulphur and crude oil residues, it is yet regarded as a highly critical fuel due to its wide applications. nowadays, biodiesel as a renewable additive is blended with diesel fuel to achieve ...

Socio-technical or strategic approach to renewable energy deployment all suggests that the uptake of renewable energy technology such as solar photovoltaic is as much a social issue as a technical issue. Among social issues, one most direct and immediate component is the cost of the renewable energy technology. Because renewable electricity provides no new functionality—a clean electron does th...

Loss Leading pricing is often referred to as an advertising strategy which allows retailers to attract consumers by subsidizing some products and make profits from other items; in this way, below-cost pricing may improve consumer welfare by compensating consumers for their lack of information. This paper shows that large retailers can instead use loss leading as an exploitative device at the de...

In this paper, we analyze technology transfers (TT) and tradable emission rights, which are core issues of the ongoing climate negotiations. Subsidizing TT leads to the adoption of better abatement technologies in developing countries, thereby reducing the international permit price. This is beneficial for industrialized countries as long as they are permit buyers, and as long as they can targe...

This paper uses simple game theory to analyze a situation where two agents compete in the transport market. The modeling frame is that of a mode choice model, where the two mode options are boat or car transportation. The basic findings are that non pareto optimal (car, car) equilibrium outcomes, may occur in a surprisingly large amount of cases. Additionally, the possible different Nash equili...

The paper analyses the timing of spontaneous environmental innovation when second-mover advantages, arising from the expectation of declining investment costs, increase the option value of waiting created by investment irreversibility and uncertainty about private payoffs. We then focus on the design of public subsidies aimed at bridging the gap between the spontaneous time of technological cha...

We develop and estimate a model of market demand for a new pharmaceutical, whose quality is learned through prescriptions by forward-looking physicians. We use a panel of antiulcer prescriptions from Italian physicians between 1990 and 1992 and focus on a new molecule available since 1990. We solve the model by calculating physicians' optimal decision rules as functions of their beliefs about t...