investment in oil and gas upstream activities is very important for the exploration and development of oil and gas fields. different and various laws and regulations deal with the investment in upstream operations. by reviewing these various laws and regulations, this research paper tries to discuss to what extent these laws and regulations have created legal confident for foreign investment up...

This article considers how the 'accidental logics' of political settlements for the English National Health Service (NHS) and the Medicare and Medicaid programmes in the United States have resulted in different institutional arrangements and different implicit social contracts for rationing, which we define to be the denial of health care that is beneficial but is deemed to be too costly. This ...

The idea that environmental trade policy can be used to achieve competitive advantage in international markets has important implications for the way we conceive free trade. This paper considers strategic environmental policy in a model that makes explicit the vertical structure that supports production of the traded good. Including intranational vertical relationships in the analysis of strate...

This paper considers an optimal life insurance for a household subject to mortality risk. The household receives wage income continuously, which could be terminated by unexpected premature loss of earning power. In order to hedge the risk of losing income stream, the household enters a life insurance contract. The household may also invest their wealth into a financial market. Therefore, the pr...

This paper presents a model of opportunistic behaviour in decentralized economic exchange and considers the impact of inadequate institutional framework of formal contract enforcement on economic performance. It is shown that (i) when the number of cheating traders is sufficiently large, inadequate institutions result in a loss of decentralized trading contracts, (ii) an adequate institutional ...

One big challenge to be overcome before the successful deployment of wireless cyber-physical systems is to provide hard real-time guarantees, not only within the wireless network, but in fact between end-to-end application processes. To achieve this, we design a distributed real-time protocol (DRP) that considers the complete transmission chain, including application tasks, peripheral busses, m...

This patient underwent breast surgery and a sentinel node biopsy performed shortly before the blood was taken. As part of the biopsy procedure, a dye (Patent Blue) is injected into the lymphatic system. After injection, patients are commonly noted to take on a grey appearance, and urine has a green discolouration . A striking green appearance of the serum has also been reported, but is seen unc...

The multibillion-dollar online advertising industry continues to debate whether to use the CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action) model as an industry standard. This article applies the economic framework of incentive contracts to study the trade-o s of these pricing models. In some conditions, the CPA model leads to higher publisher (or advertiser) payo s than the CPC model. Whether pub...

This paper considers a problem of multi-period supply portfolio selection and execution with demand information updates. A supply portfolio specifies a buyer’s decision on selecting sourcing mix from among a group of suppliers. We develop a framework for optimal supply portfolio selection and execution. Further, we demonstrate that the optimal portfolio selection follows a base-stock policy and...