Online content providers who use the Internet to distribute content experience an extremely competitive business environment. To survive in this environment, they have started charging a fee for the content that they provide. However, there have been very few success stories in commercializing online content. Although one of few success stories is the online game, it still has customers’ psycho...

This paper proposes a swarm intelligence long-term hedging tool to support electricity producers in competitive electricity markets. This tool investigates the long-term hedging opportunities available to electric power producers through the use of contracts with physical (spot and forward) and financial (options) settlement. To find the optimal portfolio the producer risk preference is stated ...

Demand for renewable energy is booming. Scholars often attribute this success to feed-in tariffs (FITs), which mandate that energy utilities pay a premium to renewable electricity producers and guarantee grid access for them. Why have so many countries, including least developed ones, adopted these policies? We hypothesize that democratic governments have political incentives to adopt the FIT b...

This paper proposes a swarm intelligence long-term hedging tool to support electricity producers in competitive electricity markets. This tool investigates the long-term hedging opportunities available to electric power producers through the use of contracts with physical (spot and forward) and financial (options) settlement. To find the optimal portfolio the producer risk preference is stated ...

Producers in a perfectly competitive industry compete to obtain shelf space at the retail level. Barring contract observability problems, slotting allowances are observed in equilibrium. Producers charge a high wholesale price, but give back their profits via up-front payments to retailers. However, if the individual supplier retailer wholesale price terms are unobservable by competitors, then ...

The present deregulated electricity industry has evolved into a distributed and competitive industry in which market forces drive the price of electricity and reduce the net cost of electricity. However the competitions in these markets require identification of the use of transmission networks, mainly the participation of utilities in losses caused in the transmission lines. This is because th...

An industry typically experiences initial mass entry and later shakeout of producers over its life cycle. It can be explained as a competitive equilibrium outcome driven by dynamic interactions between technology progress and demand diffusion. After a new product is introduced, technology improves with cumulative production and S-shaped diffusion is generated as the product penetrates a positiv...

In a competitive electricity market environment, power producers and consumers need, on one hand, accurate load and/or electricity consumption forecasting tools. These tools will ensure an a-priori knowledge on the amount of energy needed for production. On the other hand, forecasting electricity prices, may play a very important role for producers and consumers when planning bidding strategies...

We consider a competitive version of the traditional aggregate production planning model with capacity constraints. In the general case, multiple products are produced by a few competing producers (oligopoly) with limited capacities. Production quantities, prices and consequently profits depend on production and allocation decisions of each producer. In addition, there is competition for the ra...