Environmental policy affects the distribution of market shares if intermediate goods are differentiated in their pollution intensity. When innovations are environment-friendly, a tax on emissions skews demand towards new goods which are the most productive. In this case, the tax has to increase along a balanced growth path to keep the market shares of goods of different vintages constant. Compa...

In this paper we examine the influence that indirect network effects have on a durable goods manufacturer’s distribution strategy to lease or sell her product. Previous research has identified that a durable goods manufacturer can mitigate the potential for its own opportunistic behavior with respect to consumers by leasing instead of selling its product. However, we show that leasing creates a...

background, aim, method, result) max 200 words: The number of zones for unloading goods in the city centre is often small compared to the number of delivery addresses and carriers. The attendant phenomenon is congestion and its subsequent costs. One way to reduce these effects is to implement retail consolidation centres. Some trials have been carried out on urban distribution centres and a few...

This paper describes a simple model of aggregate and firm growth based on the introduction of new goods. An incumbent firm can combine labor with blueprints for goods it already produces to develop new blueprints. Every worker in the economy is also a potential entrepreneur who can design a new blueprint from scratch and set up a new firm. The implied firm size distribution closely matches the ...

This paper models the emergence of retail clusters on a supply chain network comprised of suppliers, retailers, and consumers. Firstly, an agent-based model is proposed to investigate retail location distribution in a market of two complementary goods. The methodology controls for supplier locales and unit sales prices of retailers and suppliers, and a consumer’s willingness to patronize a reta...

In many market situations such as in shopping centers, grocery stores, industrial-goods distributors, and ‘full-line manufacturers’ we see the marketing and distribution of complementary products. Sometimes the distribution function is handled by the manufacturer himself, and sometimes it is spun off to an independent distributor or middleman. This paper presents an economics-based model which ...

Rapid technological developments and deregulation of the telecommunications industry have changed the way in which content providers distribute and price their goods and services. Instead of selling a bundle of content and access through proprietary networks, these firms are shifting their distribution channels to the Internet. In this new setting, the content and Internet service providers fin...

The routing plan of a delivery fleet is usually developed a priori and provides an optimal (or near optimal) way of serving customers by taking into account certain constraints, such as vehicle capacity and delivery time windows. However, such plans may not cope adequately in a city logistics environment, in which unexpected events often occur during delivery execution (e.g. adverse traffic con...

Distribution of virtual goods over the IP based infrastructure offered by the Internet requires efficient techniques w.r.t. to the utilization of the existing resources. One approach here applies methods from the peer to peer domain to ensure that the required traffic mostly is situated in the cost efficient last mile. This paper presents this approach and discusses the security implications. T...

The global market for virtual items, characters and currencies was estimated to exceed 2.1 Billion USD in 2007. Selling virtual goods for real money is an increasingly common revenue model not only for online games and virtual worlds, but for social networking sites and other mainstream online services as well. What drives consumer spending on virtual items is an increasingly relevant question,...