Over the past three years Italy has witnessed a rapid growth in the photovoltaic energy market, followed by an equally sudden decline when the government decided to reduce the incentives. This sharp change in the trend of the market calls into question the achievement of Grid Parity and the...

The important role of friends, neighbors and colleagues in shaping individual choices has been brought out in a number of studies over the years. The presence of significant 'local' influence in shaping individual behavior suggests that firms, governments and developmental agencies should...

Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

In many cases consumers cannot observe firms' investment in quality or safety, but have only beliefs on the average quality of the industry. In addition, the outcome of the collective investment game of the firms may be stochastic since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external...

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation....

We study the driving forces behind the adoption of environmental innovations (EI) in the Italian industry over 2006-2008 through analyses of the new wave of Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data that covered for the first time environmental innovation adoptions. We investigate whether the first...

In order to face the new competitive scenario, Apulian textile firms are involved in a process of change and are trying to adopt a networking approach in analysing the international propensity of SMEs. The case of the textile network in Apulia has been analysed using a semi-structured...

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to...

This paper introduces a number of game-theoretic tools to model collusive agreements among firms in vertically differentiated markets. I firstly review some classical literature on collusion between two firms producing goods of exogenous different qualities. I then extend the analysis to a...

In this paper, we tackle the dilemma of pruning versus proliferation in a vertically differentiated oligopoly under the assumption that some firms collude and control both the range of variants for sale and their corresponding prices, likewise a multiproduct firm. We analyse whether pruning...