Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) established a market for transferable sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances among electric utilities. This market offers firms facing high marginal abatement costs the opportunity to purchase the right to emit SO2 from firms with lower costs, and is expected to yield cost savings compared to a command and control approach to environmental ...

Demand response (DR) extends customer participation to power systems and results in a paradigm shift from simplex to interactive operation in power systems due to the advancement of smart grid technology. Therefore, it is important to model the customer characteristics in DR. This paper proposes customer information as the registration and participation information of DR, thus providing indices...

Both in US antitrust and EU competition policy a development to a broader application of rule of reason instead of per se rules can be observed. In the European discussion the attempt to base competition policy on a "more economic approach" is mainly viewed as improving the economic analysis in the assessment of specific cases. In this paper it is shown from a general law and economics perspect...

"With intellectual property, the upfront costs are what it's all about, " (Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates) explained to the business titans assembled at the Redmond, Wash., campus (last May). " Say a piece of software costs $10 million to create and the marginal costs, because it's going to be distributed electronically, are basically zero. " Once the costs of development have been recouped, " e...

Discussion papers are research materials circulated by their authors for purposes of information and discussion. They have not undergone formal peer review or the editorial treatment accorded RFF books and other publications. Abstract Uncertainty about costs causes otherwise equivalent price and quantity controls to result in different quantity responses and costs. Weitzman (1974) found that th...

We explore the effects of trade costs on markups by building a new model consistent with three stylized facts: exporters charge higher markups, markups increase when starting to export, and domestic and foreign sales are negatively correlated, which suggests decreasing returns. We calibrate the model to Chilean data, and simulate reductions in trade costs. Most markups increase along the intens...

introduction sarcheshmeh copper mine is regarded as the second largest copper deposit in the world. this is one of the largest industrial-mining complexes in the world and the largest producer of copper in iran. this complex plays an important role in iran’s economy. in 2012, this complex created employment for about 8000 people in iran and produced 203065 tons of copper cathodes. however, high...