1 Key findings Private sector rents across England 1996/97 – 2000/01 • In 2000/01, the average rent of furnished property was £91.94 and that of furnished property was £79.78. • Through the observation period, the national averages of both furnished and unfurnished property rents continuously increased. • By region, in 2000/01, the highest furnished property rent and unfurnished property rent w...

In the presence of cost uncertainty, limited liability introduces the possibility of default in procurement with its associated bankruptcy costs. When …nancial soundness is not perfectly observable, we show that incentive compatibility implies that …nancially less sound contractors are selected with higher probability in any feasible mechanism. Informational rents are associated with unsound …n...

It is well known that some XML elements correspond to objects (in the sense of object-orientation) and others do not. The question we consider in this paper is what benefits we can derive from paying attention to such object semantics, particularly for the problem of keyword queries. Keyword queries against XML data have been studied extensively in recent years, with several lowest-common-ances...

In democracies, elections are the primary mechanism for making politicians act in voters’ interests, but voters are unable to prevent that some resources are diverted to political rents. With two levels of government, the rents are reduced if voters require higher bene…cial public expenditures for reelecting incumbents. Voters can also strengthen their power by holding politicians also liable f...

The establishment of a tradable permit market requires the regulator to select a level of aggregate emissions and then distribute the associated permits (rent) to speci…c groups. In most circumstances, these decisions are often politically contentious and frequently in‡uenced by rent seeking behaviour. In this paper, we use a contest model to analyse the e¤ects of rent seeking e¤ort when permit...