Food safety has become an important food quality attribute within the last decade. In 2002, we conducted a consumer survey with 449 subjects in Kiel to determine actual consumer perceptions to food quality and safety. We compared these data with our former consumer surveys in Kiel. Over the past decade food quality is perceived to have improved. Regarding to food related health risks, the feeli...

Network creation games have been studied in many different settings recently. These games are motivated by social networks in which selfish agents want to construct a connection graph among themselves. Each node wants to minimize its average or maximum distance to the others, without paying much to construct the network. Many generalizations have been considered, including non-uniform interests...

In wagonload traffic, a production form in railway freight traffic, small groups of wagons have to be transported. In order to decrease transportation costs, wagons from different relations are consolidated. In railyards trains can be separated and rearranged to new trains. The costs arising from this process, which is called reclassification, must be balanced with the transportation costs. The...

The level of price volatility should theoretically be confined to export parity price levels at the lower end and import parity price levels at the upper end of the price band, reflecting supply and demand conditions during surplus and deficit marketing seasons respectively. A greater gap between these export and import parity prices will reflect high marketing costs, often representing high tr...

Soctal Securtty checks dehvered to beneflclarles m the first week of July 1978 reflected the fourth automattc cost-of-ltvmg tncrease tn cash benefits under leglslatlon enacted tn 1972 and 1973 The 6 5-percent tncrease, which became effectwe to June, apphed to benefits for all persons on the social security benefit rolls at the end of Mdy, except those recetvmg benefits under the “spectal mmm~m ...

In two-sided matching markets, stability can be costly. We define social welfare functions for matching markets and use them to formulate a definition of the price of stability. We then show that it is common to find a price tag attached to stability, and that the price of stability can be substantial. Therefore, when choosing a matching mechanism, a social planner would be well advised to weig...

We consider a Hotelling game where a finite number of retailers choose a location, given that their potential consumers are distributed on a network. Retailers do not compete on price but only on location, therefore each consumer shops at the closest store. We show that when the number of retailers is large enough, the game admits a pure Nash equilibrium and we construct it. We then compare the...

Asset prices have played a prominent role in the present business cycle, both in terms of the amplitude of their fluctuations and because of their impact on financial institutions and economic activity. Such medium-term swings are of course not new; the last similar episode took place in the early 1970s. What has drawn attention to the recent asset price movements is not only their absolute siz...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of the world oil market and tests whether OPEC countries colluded and whether non-OPEC countries behaved oligopolistically over the period 1970-2004. The model generates estimates of the shadow price of the resource with minimal functional form assumptions. Results support oligopolistic behavior among non-OPEC producers and collusion among OPEC producers exc...