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The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective preferences and also in terms of some notion of their objective interests. This paper provides a framework for evaluation of policies in terms of welfare criteria that combine these two considerations. Sufficient conditions are provided for such a criterion to imply the same ranking of social states as does Pareto's unanimity criterion. Sufficiency is proved via study of a community of agents with interdependent ordinal preferences., 24 pages

This paper develops a simple model to explain the phenomenon of persistent unemployment, even in an economy experiencing high output growth. In the model, unemployment grows at a rate identical with the growth rate of input factors and sectors. The result is primarily triggered by a pre-fixed minimum wage for unskilled workers. To corroborate our claim, we have empirically tested our model hypothesis using data for 12 developing countries and found empirical results consistent with the theory. To mitigate or reduce unemployment, history becomes crucial in deciding on the desired rate of growth in different sectors.

In 2012 and 2013, solar energy has become the most important source of renewable energy in the European Union, whose main role is to produce electric power. Business models in the solar energy field, as well as the perception on the legal context, that is a major source of influence for the companies in the field, have been a main subject of debate in Romania and the European Union, but have not been scientifically researched. The purpose of this paper is to develop a comparative study on the situation of business models in the Romanian field of solar energy, between the years 2013 and 2014, as well as the development of photovoltaic industry forecasts in Romania in the coming years. In order to perform this study, we used the method of Delphi based on questionnaires and interviews with experts in this field of activity. This study is a continuation of the research carried out last year (Tanţău et al., 2014) and illustrate the major changes in the Romanian field of photovoltaic energy, after modifying the law No. 220/2008 by Emergency Ordinance of the Romanian Government No. 57/2013 and the appearance of Decision of the Government No. 994/2013. The study treats the new directions in the field of photovoltaic energy in Romania representing the basic pylon of the future trends of business models in the photovoltaic industry, that were not previously provided in the scientific literature.

The main reason for addressing competitiveness at SMEs level is that, ultimately, the meso or macro level competitiveness is generated at the enterprises level, the main actors of economic life. It is one of the most used levels of analysis in the literature, due to the special interest shown by companies in their competitive assessment of the situation by referring to direct competitors, using tools that easily lends itself to comparisons between companies (benchmarking is one of the most used systems), particularity of the comparison, using quantitative indicators widely accepted and easily comparable - the profit, market share etc.

This paper is aimed at developing a general equilibrium model useful to determine the equilibrium expansion rate of money supply in a small open stochastic economy. The marginal change of money supply incorporates stylized facts in emerging economies reported in empirical literature such as regime switches in volatility and unexpected sudden jumps (interventions). To model these essentials, money supply will be driven by a time-homogeneous Markov modulated jump diffusion process. Under this framework, it is found that the expansion rate of money supply depends on the current exchange rate depreciation, the interest rate, the average size on the jump process, and the regime switching in volatility. The proposed model allows using the Monte Carlo method to simulate the average path of the equilibrium expansion rate of money.

Aristotle’s economics of exchange: (a) Ideally, reciprocal justice in bilateral bargaining to minimize expenditure given utility levels results in Pareto-efficient, envy-free, equitable outcomes. (b) Practically, bargaining under the threat or actual recontracting may act as a surrogate of reciprocal justice, leading to an N-person (N-dimensional) contract topology. (c) But, recontracting is subject to practical limitations too, in which case near-reciprocal justice/general equilibrium outcomes may be fostered if, as a surrogate of recontracting, modesty in interaction is exhibited in an evolutionarily-stable-strategy fashion. (d) That is, incomplete recontracting amounts to asymmetric agent-type information, which in turn lays the ground for injustices; the same lack of information prevents rectificatory justice from being efficient and hence, modesty can be efficient only if it operates as a social norm and hence, only in a modest polity, which can be no other than democracy. The modern-day terminology used in connection with Aristotle sounds bizarre, but by this is meant that his thinking and answers on issues preoccupying social science for centuries, do not differ much from modern-day approaches to the same issues.

The present work consists of two parts: the first part is a comparative analysis of the number of bank branches per 100,000 adults and of population and ATMs per 100,000 adults in Romania and other four EU countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Poland), and the second part consists in an analysis of the correlation between the three indicators. Actually, we shall determine if there is a strong correlation between the influenced factor (the number of bank branches per 100,000 adults) and the other two influential factors (population and number of ATMs per 100,000 adults), and the intensity of this correlation. We shall present primary statistical data for all the indicators of the above mentioned countries.

This paper reconstructs the essential traits of Garegnani's thought on the theory of distribution. In particular, it reconstructs the central point of his work (which saw him involved in debates with economists such as Blaug, Bliss, Hahn, Hollander, Joan Robinson and Samuelson) – namely, the development of Sraffa's work, both regarding the critique of the marginalist theory of value and distribution, and the revival of the surplus approach of Smith, Ricardo and Marx. It also reconstructs a characteristic which was a constant of Garegnani's activity – that is, his attention to concrete economic phenomena and the search for economic policies able to assure high levels of employment and the well-being of the greatest part of the population. These two traits of Garegnani's work are traceable since his first contributions to economic theory – namely, from his 1958 PhD thesis entitled A Problem in the Theory of Capital from Ricardo to Wicksell to his 1962 work for Svimez, where Garegnani faced the issue of how to achieve a higher rate of growth in a case like that of Italy, characterised by large areas with high labour underemployment. The two traits were of course strictly interconnected, as, for instance, the suggestion in favour of Keynesian economic policies, or the criticism (especially in the absence of full employment of resources) to Pareto optimality and its implications for policy analysis could not but pass through a critique of the marginalist theory and the simultaneous clarification and development of an alternative theoretical approach.

The 21st century is burdened by a series of dramatic changes and efforts are carried out to find potential solutions to consumerism, access to information, transient climate disequilibria, health care and demographic transformations. A new page in human history will bear witness to the introduction of new ways of thinking, new changes, new relationships and interconnections that transcend states and societies. The moment is ripe for individuals aware of the implications carried by global changes and challenges, to step up and encourage responsibility and sustainable development. Mankind is currently living in a data-rich world, where information is widely dispersed. Nevertheless, extracting the right assumptions and conclusions from the available data proves difficult as numerous social phenomena do not run with clockwork precision as the laws governing the Newtonian universe. Human awareness and intelligence demand a more responsible approach to all operations and steps should be made in determining the consequences and their impact. The goal of this paper is not restricted to providing a review but also to enforce certain ideas in relation to the complex interactions specific to society and economic activities.

It is generally believed that a rise in foreign competition makes the industrial sector more efficient. By using a novel firm-level data set from a variety of industries in Pakistan, this paper revisits productivity-liberalization link, and investigates the effect of trade liberalization on competition and firm productivity. We find that productivity gains from reducing overall tariff rates are not obvious from a simple regression of total factor productivity on tariff rates; if there are any gains from reducing tariffs on intermediate goods, they are greatly counterbalanced by reduction in tariffs on final goods. There is evidence of an increase in competition following trade liberalization. In a majority of industries, there is reduction in returns to scale, indicating the existence of inflexible capacity constraints in these industries. Moreover, it offers evidence for the perception that gains from trade liberalization in the form of improvement in firm productivity have been greatly exaggerated.

L’economiste italien Enrico Barone (1859-1924) est principalement connu pour ses contributions a la theorie de la productivite marginale et au debat sur la planification socialiste. Ce papier analyse les contributions de Barone a la theorie de la concurrence parfaite, contributions largement ignorees dans la litterature secondaire. Il inclut sa methodologie; la definition, les conditions et les consequences de la concurrence parfaite; son contexte institutionnel; et le processus d’ajustement. Il contient egalement certains graphiques de Barone qui illustrent le fonctionnement de la concurrence parfaite. Le papier demontre que Barone merite une place dans l’histoire de la theorie de la concurrence parfaite.

We analyze a market game where traders are heterogeneous with respect to their rationality level and have asymmetric information. The market mechanism results into a statistical equilibrium, where traders randomise among their available actions due to their limited rationality. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for convergence of statistical to strategic equilibria of market games, when traders become more informed and increasingly more rational.

We develop a framework for optimal taxation when agents can earn their income both in traditional activities, where private and social products coincide, and in rent-seeking activities, where private returns exceed social returns either because they involve the capture of pre-existing rents or because they reduce the returns to traditional work. We characterize Pareto optimal income taxes that do not condition on how much of an individual's income is earned in each of the two activities. These optimal taxes feature an externality-corrective term, the magnitude of which depends both on the Pigouvian correction that would obtain if rent-seeking incomes could be perfectly targeted and on the relative impact of rent-seeking externalities on the private returns to traditional and to rent-seeking activities. If rent-seeking externalities primarily affect other rent-seekers, for example, the optimal correction lies strictly below the Pigouvian correction. A calibrated model indicates that the gap between the Pigouvian and optimal correction can be quantitatively important. Our results thus point to a hefty informational requirement for correcting rent-seeking externalities through the income tax code.

We discuss a model, in which two agents may distribute finitely many objects among themselves. The conflict is resolved by means of a market procedure. Depending on the specifications, this procedure serves to achieve bargaining solutions such as the discrete Raiffa solution, the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution and the Perles-Maschler solution. The latter is axiomatized using the superadditivity axiom, which in the present context is readily interpreted as resolving a specific source of conflict potential.

This review discusses research demonstrating that club economies and coalition economies with many participants and relatively small effective groups (clubs, jurisdictions, or coalitions) are competitive. Small groups are effective if all or almost all gains to collective activities can be realized by cooperation restricted to them. At this point, there are many papers in the literature demonstrating the competitiveness of club and coalition economies in a variety of contexts. To facilitate the exposition, I treat economies with quasi-linear utilities and games with side payments. The main concepts and results for this framework are discussed. Additionally, relationships are established with regard to broader models of club and coalition economies, including very recent contributions to the literature.

La crise a mis en evidence la distance importante qui existe entre la theorie economique et les phenomenes qu’elle est censee expliquer. Je donne quelques explications historiques de cette divergence entre la theorie et la realite. Puis je discute de la solidite des fondements de la theorie de l’equilibre general et de l’economie financiere et les raisons pour lesquelles nos modeles n’incorporent pas la possibilite d’une crise. Je suggere quelques pistes pour une analyse qui tienne compte de la possibilite de ce genre d’episode, avec des exemples simples. Une fois l’economie consideree comme un systeme complexe et evolutif, le probleme de son analyse theorique, mais aussi de sa regulation, change de nature. Les responsables politiques ont clairement indique le besoin de nouvelles approches, et les economistes ont la responsabilite de les fournir.

We show that, in a pure exchange smooth economy, a redistribution of endowments involving singular economies can be supported by a unique and continuous path of supporting equilibrium price vectors if this redistribution is the projection of a path on the equilibrium manifold transversal to the set of critical equilibria.

(Originally published in Journal of Quantitative Economics (2000), 16 (2): 53-64) - In an n x n economy, the relation between commodity prices and factor prices has been presented in terms of finite variations. Using a generalization of the dominant diagonal condition on the Jacobian of the set of unit cost functions, this paper shows that a rise in the price of any commodity will bring about an increase in the earnings of the corresponding factor, making no other factor better off than that factor while the earnings of at least one other factor will not increase. Strengthening the requirement further shows that the earnings of at least one factor will decline.

Over time it was concluded that the risk associated is a vital component of all economic activities, which can not only manage the fight, considering that if they do not assume any risk you may lose opportunities to win, which means that the risk assumed under established can bring value to the institution, representing a process of risk management becomes competitive advantage. Increased operational risk in recent years has been enhanced by the creation of products and services ever more complex financial innovations, increased competition, etc.. That required an adequate operational risk management and included in the internal capital estimation and allocation. Due to its novelty and importance of operational risk treatment I chose this theme, showing how to calculate the capital requirement needed to cover operational risk for a institution in Romania using both simple methods and advanced methods, in order to highlight the approach best

The importance of capital structure to corporate financial stability, growth and adequate returns and liquidity cannot be undermined most especially in the midst of recent global financial crises has led to urgent need to embark on this study. The paper used microdata sourced from the financial statements of 10 selected firms covering 2002-2006 to pursue its investigations. The data were arranged in a cross-sectional time series fashion. Specifically, the microdata were analyzed using OLS methodology that included log-linear least squares application to conduct its tests and analyses. We found negative and significant influence of value of long-term debt, ratios of long-term debt to total liability, and ratios of short-term debt to total liability, and ratios of short-term debt to total liability; and equity capital to total liability, on returns; and positive and significant effects of domestic liquidity rate, ratios of long-term debt to equity capital and value of short-term debt, on profitability. Overall, results showed that long-term debt values lead profits under normal OLS function, followed by ratios of long-term debt to equity; short-term debt to total liability, and long-term debt to total liability in descending order of magnitude. Under log-linear function, domestic liquidity leads returns on equity, closely followed by ratios of long-term debt to total liability, and long-term debt values ranked third. It is therefore recommended that corporate firms in Nigeria (including other African countries) should strive to always maintain a balanced proportion of long-term debts in their capital structure mix; and that both the financial system (including economic system) and the corporate enterprises should always endeavor to uphold a policy of maintaining an adequate domestic liquidity rating for there to be sustained increases in corporate growth and profitability in the years ahead.

In recent years, China has faced tremendous pressure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. At the COP 15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, China committed itself to achieve a 40%¨C45% per GDP carbon dioxide emission reduction in the near future. To reach this goal, China is willing to adopt a series of new policies, including attempts to introduce a carbon tax, and to start an energy-resource-tax pilot program in the western provinces. For this research, we constructed a Multi-Regional Computable General Equilibrium model. Then we used six scenarios to evaluate the economic effects and effectiveness of energy-resource tax policy for control of carbon dioxide emissions for different regions of China. The main result of this research is the finding that an ad valorem energy resource tax can reduce carbon dioxide emissions in China. At the same time, fiscal policy might engender different effects in different regions of China. Additionally, this policy is more efficient for controlling petroleum and natural gas resources than it is for coal resources.

We can talk about price stability when not seen as inflation or deflation phenomena. Thus the European Central Bank defines price stability as an increase of up to 2% per annum of the harmonized index of consumer prices. The lowest inflation rates were recorded in countries such as Greece and Sweden, and the highest in Hungary, followed by Romania, according to recent data provided in November 2012 by the European Central Bank. Overall, most countries faced with low and relatively stable levels of inflation, explained that although individual prices of products in some sectors have seen a substantial increase in overall they were compensate of price reductions in other sectors and finally reached a relatively stable general price level

Why Infrastructure as a Service? Because by finding an answer to this question, we will find solutions relevant both to the reduction as much as possible of initial costs incurred with the IT&C infrastructure and to a better control of the operational costs such as services delivered very fast and meeting the contract requirements in terms of quality, security in continuing the business and control over investment. The paper aims at presenting the current issues related to increasing the efficiency of IT&C services which assist the company accounting. The paper analyses aspects referring to the concepts of Infrastructure as a Service and outsourcing IT&C services related to such infrastructure. Moreover, the paper highlights the advantages, the disadvantages, and the risks associated to the concept of Infrastructure as a Service as well as the benefits of applying these new technologies to the process of outsourcing IT&C services assisting the company accounting.

This discussion paper led to the publication with the same title in 'International Game Theory Review' (2012), 14(2). This note provides a methodological contribution to the allocation of joint revenues obtained from passepartouts. In a passepartout system a group of service providers offers a passepartout that allows its owners the use of specified services for an unlimited number of times during a fixed period of time. The corresponding allocation problem is then how to share the total joint revenues of the passepartout system adequately among the service providers. Arguments are provided to model a passepartout problem within the framework of bankruptcy and context-specific properties are considered in order to select an appropriate allocation rule.

This study presents empirical evidence of the effect of bank capital structure and liquidity on profitability using Nigerian data for the period 1980-2006 studied. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the auto-regressive distributed lag (ADL) model. Specifically, the study applied data on an OLS methodology that incorporated unit root tests for stationarity and co- integration. We find a positive influence of cash reserve ratio, liquidity ratio and corporate income tax; and a negative influence of bank credits to the domestic economy, savings deposit rate, gross national savings (proxy for deposits with the central bank), balances with the central bank, inflation rate and foreign private investments, on banking system profits. We equally observe that liquidity ratio leads banks’ profits in Nigeria, closely followed by balances with the central bank and then, gross national savings and foreign private investments, followed suit in that order. We therefore recommend a drastic reduction in balances with central bank, liquidity ratio and cash reserve ratio profiles by the monetary authorities to enable banks create adequate credits and release more money into circulation for effective financial intermediation to occur; ensure effective and efficient management of bank liquidity by banks to moderate levels so as to optimize profitability, and curb perennial unethical banking practices such as directly engaging in trading, importation and exportation of goods, and other speculative deals, instead of lending to the domestic economy.

The Strategic Market Game (SMG) is the general equilibrium mechanism of strategic reallocation of resources. It was suggested by Shapley and Shubik in a series of papers in the 70s and it is one of the fundamentals of contemporary monetary macroeconomics with endogenous demand for money. This survey highlights features of the SMG and some of the most important current applications of SMGs, especially for monetary macroeconomic analysis.

In an equilibrium trade model, we prove that not only the diversity effect but also the kurtosis effect will affect the pattern of comparative advantage. Furthermore, we find that, against the conventional results, if the kurtosis effect dominates the diversity effect then a country with more (less) diversified talent may export the goods produced by supermodular (submodular) technology.

Cloud Computing is a form of globalising IT&C services and represents one of the main solutions to the current issues of global economy with a view to cutting operational costs and focusing on IT&C services in several global conglomerates. Cloud solutions save companies costs on servers, licences, software, hosting, collocation, maintenance, highly specialised technical personnel, updating and upgrading of all kinds, by using a single service. This paper aims at presenting the current issues of increasing the efficiency of the computing system infrastructure which assists the accounting of companies. We have analysed aspects related to concepts such as Cloud Computing, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Virtualisation. Moreover, the essential features, the models associated to the cloud computing concept are highlighted as well as the advantages of the virtualisation of the accounting information system infrastructure.

It is shown that a Walrasian price adjustment process fails to converge to an equilibrium in an exchange economy with three consumers and three commodities, where each consumer has a quasilinear utility function, desires only two commodities, and demands positive amounts of both commodities. The instability is due to weak substitution effects in addition to asymmetrical income effects.

This paper deals with the consequences of the extension of the number of markets that are taken into consideration in a non-Walrasian equilibrium model. It is reviewed the initial content of the theory of non-Walrasian equilibrium and emphasizes the main modelling factors of the respective equilibrium. It proposes the inclusion of the capital market in the model of non-Walrasian equilibrium and is also reveals the implications of the extension of the respective model to the classification of types of non-Walrasian equilibrium and to the content of macroeconomic and structural policies. Also, it proposes an econometric method for the estimation of the type of unemployment. The respective methodology is practically used in the case of Romania for the period 1991-2004.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the interconnections between employment and unionization. We will also see how unemployment benefits drive the interplay of employment and unionization. The basic input into our model stems from cooperative game theory. Building on the Shapley value, several values for TU games with coalition structures have been presented in the literature, most notably by Aumann and Drèze and Owen. We present a value that is capable of dealing with unemployment and unionization. We show that unemployment benefits increase wages but contribute to unemployment, that unemployment can be voluntary, and that unions tend to be beneficial for employed workers if there is overstaffing.

In this paper, we introduce an extension of (TU) games with a coalition structure. Taking a situation where all coalitions are already established is not reasonable in order to forecast the reality; there is not only one possible coalition, there are several. We consider situations where coalitions are not established yet and take into account the likelihood of each possible coalition. This leads to a generalized, probabilistic setting for coalition structures. Probabilistic versions of known axioms as efficiency, symmetry or the null player axiom are introduced as well as new probabilistic axioms, the probabilistic influence axioms. The focus is on a generalization of the outside-option-sensitive χ-value in the new setting and an axiomatic characterization of it. The problematic of the impossibility of a direct axiomatization via deterministic pendants is discussed: As an example for a direct characterization we introduce and characterize a probabilistic version of the outside-option-insensitive pendant of the χ-value, the component restricted Shapley value. As another example for an outside-option-sensitive value without direct characterization we introduce a probabilistic version of the Owen value and show that a direct characterization is not possible; we link this to the problem of component decomposability.

We use experiments to study coordination in games with incomplete information. In the games, one player knows the payoffs, while the other player knows the probability of payoffs forming a prisoner's dilemma or a stag-hunt. When payoffs form a stag-hunt there are two Pareto ranked pure strategy equilibria. We ask whether cheap talk aids coordination on the socially optimal equilibrium and whether the informed player can use cheap talk to engineer her preferred outcome. Consistent with previous literature, the benefit of cheap talk depends on the relationship between payoffs and risks, and in the games we study; cheap talk benefits informed players only when the stag-hunt payoffs exhibit low risks.

From a special class of TU games with information cost, given by the problem of sharing the costs of facilities among users, we build a noncooperative game in which every player asks for the assessment of whom the users are. We analyze two models, "naming" game and majority decision game: the existence of equilibria is assured since the games are binary and symmetric, and then potential games. Since the games are ex-ante fair, we search a proposal to compensate for ex-post injustice.

This paper combines the imperfect reliability model of Bala and Goyal [2000b] with the heterogeneous player model of Galeotti et al. [2006]. We compare existence, characterization and efficiency results in the resulting framework with the results in other frameworks allowing for imperfect reliability or heterogeneity. Specifically, we compare our work with the framework of Haller and Sarangi [2005] which allows for heterogeneity in link reliability but assumes that players are homogeneous. We find, by contrast with their paper, that non existence of Nash networks is possible in our framework even if the population is very small. Moreover, although the incentives of players to maintain (or delete) links are different, in both frameworks there exist parameters such that every essential network is strict Nash and efficient.

In this paper, we present a matching market in which an institution has to hire a set of pairs of complementary workers, and has a quota that is the maximum number of candidates pair positions to be filled. We define a stable solution and first show that in the unrestricted institution preferences domain, the set of stable solution may be empty and second we obtain a complete characterization of the stable sets under responsive restriction of the institution's preference.

This article studies how a mechanism designer can influence games by promising payments to the players depending on their mutual choice of strategies. First, we investigate the cost of implementing a desirable behavior and present algorithms to compute this cost. Whereas a mechanism designer can decide efficiently whether strategy profiles can be implemented at no cost at all our complexity analysis indicates that computing an optimal implementation is generally NP-hard. Second, we introduce and analyze the concept of leverage in a game. The leverage captures the benefits that a benevolent or a malicious mechanism designer can achieve by implementing a certain strategy profile region within economic reason, i.e., by taking the implementation cost into account. Mechanism designers can often manipulate games and change the social welfare by a larger extent than the amount of money invested. Unfortunately, computing the leverage turns out to be intractable as well in the general case.

In many instances of price discrimination, a seller of an item is in possession of signals from competing buyers regarding their private valuation for the item. If the seller uses this information to price discriminate against the buyer, buyers would correspondingly modify their signalling strategy. Our paper shows that the seller can gain by sometimes strategically ignoring the information contained in the signals and pricing the item in a non-discriminatory way. This "mixed" strategy induces buyers to send more informative signals in equilibrium than if the seller were to always price discriminate. Thus the seller can offset any revenue loss in states where he ignores information by the gains made in states where he can price discriminate more effectively due to the larger amount of information now communicated in the signals.

We introduce negative externalities in the form of ill will among the players of the classic two-sided assignment game of Shapley and Shubik, by letting each player's utility be negatively correlated with the payoff of all the players in his group. The new game is very complex, but under a certain assumption of bounded rationality we derive a straightforward notion of stable outcomes as certain conjectural equilibria. We prove that several well-known properties of the set of stable outcomes in the assignment game carry over to this new game.

This article studies competitive bidding by strategic investors to buy enterprises that are being privatized through sealed-bid auctions. The bidders use a real options approach to enterprise valuation that accounts for asset quality given their private information. It is shown that the optimal bidding strategy under first-price sealed-bid auctions defines a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in which each strategic investor bids only a fraction of its prior valuation and competition decreases the bidder's profit margin. The greater the transparency and information disclosure on asset quality, the higher the seller's expected receipts will be.

The interaction between a sophisticated player and a fictitious player is analyzed and applied to the problem of optimal enforcement. An adaptive potential offender myopically responds to the history of past enforcement. How can a sophisticated enforcement official take advantage of this behavior? Will compliance with the law be attained? Conditions under which full compliance arises is derived and the optimal cycle of enforcing and not enforcing the law is presented. Welfare is shown to be greater than if the offender was sophisticated as well.

In moving from finite-action to infinite-action games, standard refinements of the Nash equilibrium concept cease to satisfy certain "natural" properties. For instance, perfect equilibria in compact, continuous games need not be admissible. This paper highlights additional properties of two standard refinement specifications that are not inherited by supersets of the set of finite games. The analysis reveals the following about the behavior of perfectness and strategic stability within a class of (possibly) discontinuous games: (1) Equilibria that assign positive probability to the interior of the set of strategies weakly dominated for some player can be chosen; (2) nonadmissible equilibria need not be ruled out when they are weakly dominated by admissible perfect equilibria; and (3) nonadmissible equilibria may be selected when admissible equilibria are ruled out.

The task of economics is apparently changing. After confronting the limits to growth, the economic interests, methods and thoughts, even its use of words and concepts are slowly but persistently modified. The discussion of “equilibrium” is replaced by the concern for a “sustainable path”. Instead of finding out how to produce “more” it looks for “better”, “cheaper” and “recyclable” commodities. Labor saving serves by and large the reduction of the working week and transformation of the life-cycle instead of surplus-production. The markets of developed countries are more easily glutted and their recessions deeper. The ever louder and more aggressive marketing attests to all this. It is high time to renew our old ways, to revisit the aged analytical and forecasting models. The renovation of obsolete concepts is rendered necessary to facilitate the introduction of an orderly and planned future of prudence. This investigation focuses less on the seldom, perhaps never occupied point of equilibrium, rather on the behavior and motion of the economic systems in its vicinity.

In this paper we study and compute E-points in an explicit way for a special general kind of 3k + 1 and 3k + 2 players.

In the present day context of globalisation as well as the effect of crisis on the economy, the evolution of companies, regardless of the specific area where they activate, should abound in keywords such as optimisation, added value, cost cutting, efficiency increase, and profitability. In this respect, cloud accounting represents a new organisational model where the IT&C supporting companies’ accounting services, are provided as online services, with users accessing software applications over the internet, without specific infrastructure or platforms and without holding the relative licences, in exchange for a monthly fee. This paper aims to present today’s issues facing the increase in the efficiency of IT&C services that support companies’ accounts. Aspects related to the concepts of Cloud Computing, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service will be analysed. In addition, the advantages, disadvantages and risks of cloud computing as well as the implementation of this new technology in the acquisition of IT&C services supporting companies’ accounting.

This paper studies new refinement concepts for correlated equilibria based on altruistic behavior of the players and generalizes some refinement concepts previously developed by the authors for Nash equilibria. Effectiveness of the concepts, relations with the corresponding notions for Nash equilibria and with other correlated equilibrium refinements are investigated. The analysis of the topological properties of the set of solutions concludes the paper.

This paper studies situations in which companies can cooperate in order to decrease the earliest completion time of a project that consists of several tasks. This is beneficial for the client who wants the project to be completed as early as possible. The client is willing to pay more for an earlier completion time. The total payoff must be allocated among the companies that cooperate. Cooperative game theory is used to model this situation. Conditions for the core of the game to be nonempty are derived. We study a class of project management games for which necessary and sufficient conditions for the nonemptiness of the core can be derived. We will show that a subset of the set of balanced project management games can be partitioned into a class of 1-convex games and a class of big boss games. Expressions for the extreme points of the core, the τ-value, the nucleolus, and the Shapley-value of games in these two classes are derived.

Stackelberg-like games show a situation where there is a clear advantage in moving first. In a thought provoking article, Bagwell [1995] shows that this advantage may not be robust against imperfect observations of the first move. We explore these ideas in the context of forward induction in three classic games, namely, the outside option game, the game of burning a dollar before the battle of the sexes and the beer-quiche game.

We study a non-cooperative model of unilateral network formation. Derks et al. [2008b] prove the existence of local-Nash and global-Nash networks for games with payoff functions that satisfy a framework of axiomatic properties. These properties are inspired by the one-way flow model, which is characterized by the following payoff structure. Each agent pays a cost for each formed link and receives profits from being connect to other agents. In this paper we fully characterize the payoff functions in the one-way flow model that satisfy all properties. We show that under certain conditions, payoff functions with heterogeneous link costs and heterogeneous profits satisfy all properties for which the existence of local-Nash networks is proved. Furthermore, we show that all payoff functions with owner-homogeneous link costs and heterogeneous profits satisfy all properties, and therefore imply the existence of global-Nash networks.

We analyze strategic delegation in a Stackelberg model with an arbitrary number, n, of firms. We show that n-1 firms delegate their production decisions and only one firm (the one whose manager is the first mover) does not. The later a manager commits to a quantity, the higher his incentive rate. Letting [Formula: see text] denote the equilibrium payoff of the firm whose manager commits in the ith stage, we show that [Formula: see text]. We also compare the delegation outcome of our game with that of a corresponding Cournot oligopoly and show that managers who commit late (early) are given higher (lower) incentive rates than managers in the Cournot market.