A thin market is a market with few buying or selling offers. The concept of market thinness, while general, is typically used in the context of financial markets. When the number of buying or selling offers is small, investors' trading positions are large relative to market size. Trading then requires price concessions and thus exerts an impact on prices. A thin market is characterized by low t...

This paper studies the inventive performance and profitability of small and medium sized firms (SMEs) that are “technology specialists” compared to the inventive performance and profitability of SMEs that are instead vertically-integrated. In this paper perspective, “technology specialists” are firms that specialize upstream in generating inventions and trade those inventions in disembodied for...

The transition from conventional power sources to renewable energy sources is taking place in a number of European countries. Electric energy storage has been proposed as an environmentally friendly solution to make this transition possible. This thesis analyzes the profitability of investing in a battery bank in Germany and the UK, using a real options model. The model determines the option va...

The paper investigates issues of scale equivalence and generalisability across different populations. This area of research is important because it allows for valid comparisons to be made when studies investigate the same constructs across qualitatively distinct populations. The study investigates the generalisability of the Narver and Slater (1990) and the Kholi, Jaworski and Kumar (1993) mode...

This paper evaluates three energy-sector market transformation programs: the Environmental Protection Agency’s on-going Green Lights program to promote on-grid efficient lighting, the World Bank Group’s new Photovoltaic Market Transformation Initiative, and the federal grain ethanol subsidy. We develop a benefit-cost model that uses experience curves to estimate unit cost reductions as a functi...

The current sales tax collection system is affecting negatively the producers income, traders' profit margins and consumers purchasing power. While the conventional wisdom in Ethiopia is that the tax on grain sales falls on traders, the evidence indicates that in large part these taxes are passed on to farmers in the form of lower producer prices and to consumers in the form of higher retail pr...

In order for organizations to survive on increasingly competitive and global markets, adequate management of intellectual capital is essential. Although increasingly more information is found in electronic formats, turning this information into valuable knowledge is still the responsibility of people by applying it in professional situations to generate value. In this paper, we describe an appr...