Turbulent oxygen transport from the overlying stratified water column into the bottom boundary layer (BBL) on the slope of a medium-sized lake was investigated using the eddy correlation (EC) technique. The seicheinduced oscillatory flow of the BBL, with a period of ,1 d, was identified as the mechanism driving turbulent oxygen transport. Sporadic short-term EC vertical oxygen fluxes exceeded t...

This paper analyses the impact of technological diversity on innovative activity at the firm level. The empirical study on a panel of European R&D active companies shows that both R&D intensity and patents increase with the degree of technological diversification of the firm. Possible explanations are that, on the one hand, a firm that diversifies its technology can receive more spillovers from...

We study the behavior of football (soccer) referees in the German Bundesliga. Referees are requested to act as impartial agents. However, they may be tempted to allocate benefits and rewards in a biased way. Agency theory has long neglected this form of malfeasance of economic agents, but has rather concentrated on agents exerting suboptimal effort levels. Favoritism or biased behavior of refer...

This paper examines the influence that product market competition has on the use of incentive payment schemes. We use data from a large representative cross-section survey which allows us to control for other influences. We show that the degree of product market competition that an establishment faces has a significantly positive effect on the likelihood that it will use a performance-related p...

This paper revisits the standard analysis of licensing a cost reducing innovation by an outside innovator to a Cournot oligopoly. We propose a new mechanism that combines elements of a license auction with royalty licensing by granting the losers of the auction the option to sign a royalty contract. The optimal new mechanism eliminates the losses from exclusionary licensing without reducing bid...

Financing constrains on investment are mainly important for small privately owned firms. Yet most of the investment literature focuses on the financing constraints of large publicly owned firms. This paper develops a financing constraints test based on a variable capital investment equation. Because it does not require the information about marginal q, the test can be easily applied to small fi...

This version of January 26, 2007. German chemical manufacturing industry experienced a major downsizing during 1992–2004. On the average, size of the firm almost halved. Using modern frontier efficiency analysis, this paper investigates technical and scale efficiency of firms. Based on reliable census data, analysis suggests that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical effic...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. We propose a buying mechanism which can be viewed as a game theoretic extension of Dantzig’s greedy heuri...

In our paper targets, by setting a reserve price, screen acquirers on their (expected) ability to generate merger-specific synergies. Both empirical evidence and many common merger models suggest that the difference between highand low-synergy mergers becomes smaller during booms. This implies that the target’s opportunity cost for sorting out relatively less fitting acquirers increases and, he...

Two major methods of explaining economic institutions are compared for the case of a homogenous quadratic duopoly market. In the indirect evolutionary approach, sellers may evolve to care for sales, in addition to profit. In the strategic delegation approach, sellers may design incentives so that their agents care for sales. The two approaches model different phenomena, but both allow certain k...