BACKGROUND Recently the financial status of primary care trusts has come under considerable scrutiny by the government, and financial deficits have been blamed on poor local management of resources. This paper examines the factors that differ between those Primary Care Trusts (PCT) in financial deficit and those in surplus, using readily available data at PCT level. PCTs are the National Health...

Scholars have long studied the conditions under which the cabinet making process will result in minority, surplus majority, or minimum-winning governing coalitions in parliamentary systems. A recent contribution, Laver and Shepsle's portfolio allocation model, argues that surplus majority coalitions can only form when the number of salient policy dimensions in the political system is greater th...

This paper provides empirical evidence regarding the impact of agricultural technologies on smallholders’ output market participation. The analysis is based on Farmer Innovation Fund impact evaluation survey collected by the World Bank in 2010-2012 covering 2,675 households in Ethiopia. Endogenous treatment effect and sample selection models are employed to account for the self-selection bias i...

We study bargaining on the division of a surplus in the presence of monotonicity constraints. The monotonicity constraints specify a complete order on the players, which has to be respected by the shares in the surplus the players obtain in any bargaining outcome. A player higher in the order should not receive a lower share of the surplus. We analyze the resulting subgame perfect equilibria in...

We study optimal auctions when contacting prospective bidders is costly and the bidders’ values are correlated. Although full surplus extraction is in general impossible, we can construct a search mechanism that fully extracts the surplus with an arbitrarily high probability. JEL Classification: D44, D82, D83

We consider a supply chain where one manufacturer sells products to local markets through dealers. Each dealer faces a geographically dispersed market with uncertain demand, and is able to observe demand signal and exert effort to enhance sales. Both signal and effort affect the sales outcomes probabilistically, and cannot be observed by the manufacturer. Furthermore, dealers’ signals are corre...

Real-time weather data were used in the simulation to promote renewable energy utilisation in the smart grid approach. The case study was conducted for the 11 cities in the Tochigi prefecture to show the suitability of renewable energy and to determine the regions that might use it. Solar power had the highest capability of producing electricity, followed by biomass, hydropower, and wind power....