Die vorliegende Arbeit gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Der erste Teil widmet sich der Fragestellung inwiefern formelle Gruppeneigentumsrechte Herkunftsgemeinschaften vor unautorisierten Verwendungen ihrer traditionellen kulturellen Ausdrucksweisen (TKAs) schützen können. Kapitel 2 und 3 führen...

My philosophical case study concerns textbook presentations of the theory of demand. Does this theory contain anything more than just a collection of tautologies? In order to determine its empirical content, it must be viewed holistically. But then, the theory implies false factual claims. We...

There is substantial empirical evidence and increasing recognition that not only outcomes, but also the procedures leading to them, can affect people' s utility from, and their reactions to, those decisions. However, there is still a large gap between numerous studies by non-economists (e.g.,...

Chapter 1: Efficient Design of an Auction with Discrete Bid Levels This paper studies one of auction design issues: the choice of bid levels. Full efficiency is generally unachievable with a discrete auction. Since there may be more than one bidder who submits the same bid, the auction cannot...

Tackling the problem of ecosystem services degradation is an important policy challenge. Different types of economic instruments have been employed by conservation agencies to meet this challenge. Notable among them are Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes that pay private landowners to...

Buying environmental services from private landholders using tendering mechanisms are usuallysubject to a budget constraint. Auction theory has mostly focused on target-constrained auctionsand is not well developed for this type of auction. This paper examines the predictive capacity of asimple...

This paper develops a model of farmer decision-making to examine the extent to which uncertainties about the performance of site-specific technologies (SSTs) and about the weather impact the value of these technologies. The model uses the jointly estimated risk and technology parameters to...

This paper deals with the effects of uncertain output prices upon fishers' location choices. It employs ARIMA models to construct the price forecasts used by fishers in a model which generates expected profits for three fishing locations in the British Columbia salmon fishery. A random utility...