As with most water companies in the world UK water companies face very little competition for the delivery of water within their area. However, recently both the government and the regulator, Ofwat, have indicated that they wish to see a major change in the industry through a significant growth of competition. The pricing of common carriage of water will be central to whether this objective can...

Theoretical models have been ambiguous on the relationship between industry competition and inventory holdings of manufacturing firms. Facing competition, on the one hand, firms may desire to hold more inventory to avoid losing sales to competitors; on the other hand, firms strive to improve inventory turns to control costs and stay competitive. Using U.S. Census data on manufacturing industrie...

Research shows that continuing competitive pressure applied during development and production leads to better industry performance, often at reduced cost. However, the entrenched practice of one-time competition for an entire program life-cycle often endows the winner with a very strong monopolistic power that lasts for decades. This paper describes continuous competition as leverage to acquire...

A great demand of qualified Integrated Circuits (IC) designers has been observed around the world due to the increasing market of semiconductors, wireless communication and Internet. As a result, engineering schools are obligated to ensure the education of a greater number of new designers. To this goal, professional Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools for microelectronics are preferred rather th...

During the last two decades the European airport industry is liberalised and turned to competitive market environment. This fact attracts an increasing scientific and practical interest to analysis of airport efficiency and its determinants, as well as different aspects of airport competition. This paper contains a critical review of existing researches in these two areas – airport efficiency a...

0026-2714/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.microrel.2010.09.031 E-mail address: [email protected] At the moment, a major paradigm change, from 2D IC to 3D IC, is occurring in microelectronic industry. Joule heating is serious in 3D IC, and vertical interconnect is the critical element to be developed. Also reliability concerns will be extremely important. For example, in order ...

Owing to the evolution of the smart grid, the emergence of hybrid power systems (HPSs), and the proliferation of plug-in-hybrid electric vehicles, the development of efficient and robust maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithms for renewable energy sources due to their inherent intermittent nature has overwhelmed the power industry. In this paper, an incremental conductance (IC) based Her...

We develop a simple general equilibrium framework to study the effects of global competition on banking industry dynamics and welfare. We apply the framework to the Mexican banking industry, which underwent a major structural change in the 1990s as a consequence of both government policy and external shocks. Given high concentration in the Mexican banking industry, domestic and foreign banks ac...

In this paper, we develop a differentiated duopoly model with endogenous cost-reducing R&D and review the argument on welfare effect of price and quantity competition in the presence of technology licensing. We show that the standard conclusion on duopoly (Singh and Vives, 1984) can be completely reversed. Cournot competition induces lower R&D investment than Bertrand competition does. Moreover...