ZEW Discussion Papers

Voluntary environmental management programs for firms have become an increasingly popular instrument of environmental policy. However, the literature’s conclusion on the effectiveness of such programs is…

This paper studies the effect of forward contracts on the stability of collusion among firms, competing in supply functions on the spot market. A forward market can increase the range of discount factors which…

This review summarizes the empirical literature on the effects of natural disasters and weather variations on international trade flows. A first result is that the body of literature is actually not as small …

Evidence-based STI (science, technology, and innovation) policy making requires accurate indicators of innovation in order to promote economic growth. However, traditional indicators from patents and…

We investigate whether online travel agents (OTAs) assign hotels worse positions in their search results if these set lower hotel prices at other OTAs or on their own websites. We formally characterize how…

While emissions trading schemes are developed by nations to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions, behavioural studies have shown that the political and public acceptability of these market-based instruments…

Feed-in tariffs are a widespread policy instrument to support the diffusion of renewable energy technologies. I investigate the impact of the size-based differentiation of these tariffs on the adoption of…

Bidding in first-price auctions crucially depends on the beliefs of the bidders about their competitors' willingness to pay. We analyze bidding behavior in a first-price auction in which the knowledge of…

I investigate the decision problem of a player in a game of incomplete information who faces uncertainty about the other players' strategies. I propose a new decision criterion which works in two steps.…