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Le Celebri Sculture Del Cavaliere Alberto Thorwaldsen
Full text linkLE CELEBRI SCULTURE DEL CAVALIERE ALBERTO THORWALDSEN
Le Celebri Sculture Del Cavaliere Alberto Thorwaldsen ([1]r
The liberalization of natural gas markets : regulatory reform and competition failures in Italy
Full text linkIn the last decade, the EU has started to liberalize national gas markets and regulatory reform has followed in member countries. We analyse the basic issues concerning network and storage regulation and the implementation of regulatory reforms in Italy. We then try to explain why, in gas importing countries, such reforms are not sufficient to foster competition. Even regulation ex-post by the Competition Commission has proved to be a formidable task, to the extent that entry barriers in the market for imports depend on congestion of transit pipelines still controlled by the incumbent. Moreover, when gas supply is characterized by long-term importing contracts with take-or-pay clauses, liberalization policies lead to entry and market segmentation without benefits for consumers. In order to foster gas-to-gas competition, the development of wholesale exchanges at market hubs is then necessary. However, new investments in essential facilities are required to reach this aim. At present, new investments are both subsidized and exempted from third party access regulation for financial reasons, but we claim that the incentive to invest is negatively affected by a lack of ownership unbundling
Liberalizzazioni e Accesso alle Essential Facilities: Concorrenza e Regolamentazione nello Stoccaggio di Gas Naturale
No full textAbstract
Due to the liberalisation of the natural gas market in Europe, access to storage facilities should be granted to any firm operating in the wholesale market for gas. However single Countries are left with the option between negotiated access and regulated access. We investigate the issue of optimal regulation of gas storage on the basis of the essential facility doctrine. A typical test is applied to storage plants in order to ascertain if they should be treated as essential facilities, then the same test is considered in the case of Italy. We establish that regulated access is necessary in the first liberalisation stages. However in order to achieve efficiency concerning the allocation of scarce storage resources, the price of storage should correspond to its value for each firm. Therefore auctions can perform better with respect to cost reflective tariffs, as a regulatory instrument. Such a conclusion concerns also Italy where storage still represents an essential facility and capacity is rationed due both to strategic storage requirements imposed by security of supply concerns and to inefficient allocation procedures
Overcompliance and Voluntary Agreements
No full textAbstract. Voluntary agreements with industry offer many examples of overcompliance with respect
to environmental standards. Such phenomena seem to be irrational but appear less surprising considering
firms’ strategies are aimed to internalise environmental quality. We model the choice of
the environmental quality of products in a one-shot game between a monopolist and consumers,
to show the existence of inefficient equilibria where quality is low because of moral hazard. The
firm can, however, change its’ equilibrium strategy in a repeated but finite game, in order to build
an environmental reputation if we suppose that consumers’ information is not only imperfect with
regard to quality, but also incomplete with respect to any environmental constraint that may affect
the behaviour of firms (like the threat either of a stricter regulation or of potential entry). In a twoperiod
model, we show the existence of a perfect Bayesian equilibrium in mixed strategies where
the firm can revert to the production of green products in order to influence consumers’ beliefs and
acquire an environmentally friendly reputation. Due to the peculiarity of environmental information
(green products are credence goods), we claim that an explicit agreement is also necessary in order to
establish monitoring and controlling procedures to verify the performance of firms. These procedures
can explain per se the diffusion of voluntary agreements that are nevertheless self-enforcing because
of the reputation effect
Product Liability in the European Union: Compensation and Deterrence Issues
No full textIn Europe a common standard of strict liability has been introduced with the European directive 85/374. The
implementation of this Directive has not led to an expansion of product liability cases. Moreover neither the
product nor the insurance market has been dislocated as in the United States. Both the fact that most liability
cases continue to be discussed under national legislation—even when it is based on liability with fault—and the
different price of insurance in Eurpean Countries show that the directive did not reach its harmonisation goals.
We discuss the optional provisions that limit strict liability under the directive, but claim that the scarce impact of
liability laws—in spite of increasing concerns for product safety—may be due to compensation provided by the
Welfare State and to the cost of access to justice in Europe. Compensation by theWelfare State is inadequate with
respect to the internalisation of the cost of accidents especially when public institutions do not file claims against
liable producers. Product safety regulation should have performed the deterrence function. However we also point
out that the threat of reputation losses is a powerful incentive for firms to carefully control product safety, when
consumers increasingly care about product quality and accidents are heavily advertised by media
Coordination and Private Provision of Discrete Public Goods by Correlated Equilibria
No full textThe strategic analysis of the private provision of a discrete public good has shown the existence of multiple Nash equilibria with the efficient number of players voluntarily contributing. However the coordination issue is left unexplained by this literature. The experimental evidence shows that communication among players is helpful in achieving cooperation. We claim that, from the theoretical point of view, this is equivalent to playing correlated equilibria in an extended public good game with communication, modeled as Chicken. We characterize such equilibria as feasible coordination mechanisms to achieve public goods provision in the general contributiongame.We further introduce a second kind of game characterized by payoff externalities that may persist after the minimal threshold of contributors is achieved. While it is easy to show the existence of Pareto efficient correlated equilibria in the first game, in the second one players face incentive problems such that a first best cannot always be an equilibrium. Nevertheless there exist correlated equilibria that can qualify as incentive efficient mechanisms, once free riding is seen as a moral hazard issue. Finally, with an example, we discuss
the impact of coalition formation in our framewor
The Regulation of Access to Gas Storage
No full textThough cost reflective storage tariffs may be effective in controlling market power they are suboptimalboth with respect to the allocation of existing storage capacity and to investment incentives. Regulatd tariffs may be coupled with inefficient rationing procedures that allocate scarce storage independently of their value for gas sellers. Such a value is heterogeneous because it depends on the availability of storage substitutes whose distribution is asymmetric among gas sellers and typically gives an advantage to incumbents and to dual-fuel operators. A market nechanism based on a storage auction would be a a better rationing tool in order to assign capacity according to the willingness to pay for it and improve the efficiency of storage allocation. Moreover the auction is supposed to assign scarcity rents to storage operators and can then work as incentive to invest in new storage capacity
Price Competition and Consumer Externalities in a Vertically Differentiated Duopoly with Information Disparities
No full textvertical product differentiation, asymmetric information, quality uncertainty, consumers externalities, prices as quality signals., L13, L15,
Privatizzazioni e liberalizzazioni: i servizi di pubblica utilità fra politica e finanza
No full textPrivatizzazioni e liberalizazioni: riforme bloccate e interventi last minute nei servizi di pubblica utilità
No full textAnalisi degli interventi di poliitca economica riguardanti i servizi di pubblica utilità in Italia nel 200
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