Dynamic issues in applied microeconomics: market performance, market structure and advertising competition

This dissertation addresses issues of oligopoly markets where advertising plays a prominent role. The first study empirically investigates the effect of advertising regulations on equilibrium consumption of an addictive commodity using U.S. cigarette industry data. The results of the first study show that the advertising regulations reduced cigarette consumption by increasing the industry’s market power. In addition we find that a representative smoker is relatively impatient, an expected outcome for a commodity like cigarettes, where physical dependence, procrastination, and cognitive dissonance would lead to a high rate of time preference. In the second study, by using the same data set, we look at the effect of advertising regulations on the supply side of firm’s cost minimization behavior. Economic theory provides two alternative hypotheses, which are investigated empirically. According to the LeChatelier principle, regulations that limit substitution possibilities among inputs will reduce efficiency. Alternatively, a prisoner’s dilemma game in advertising suggests that advertising regulations may have a coordination effect which leads to higher efficiency. We use Data Envelopment Analysis to determine which effect is dominant. The results show that the Broadcast Advertising Ban in 1971 improved the industry’s cost efficiency, implying that the coordination effect dominates the LeChaterlier effect. The third study addresses the effect of advertising on the market structure and performance using U.S. brewing industry data. The results indicate that an increase in the minimum efficient scale and a high advertising intensity are primal causes of rising concentration in the U.S. brewing industry. This finding is consistent with Sutton’s (1992) prediction. We also find empirical evidence of market power at very high levels of concentration

Structural studies of the hipersaline adaptation of proteins belonging to halophilic archaea

183 p.Adaptation of organisms to extreme halophilic environments (> 1 ¿ 2 M) occurs through theaccumulation of large intracellular concentrations of KCl. Their major adaptive feature is theextensive modification of the constituting proteome. A biased set of amino acids is selected inorder to improve the stability and solubility of halophilic proteins: large hydrophobic residuesare penalized, specially lysines, whereas small, polar and often negatively charged residuesare favoured, such as aspartic acid, threonine and glutamic acid (Figure I4). Themodifications occur mainly at the surface, so the overall structure is conserved. Themolecular determinants for such a selection remain elusive despite of considerable efforts.Previous models based on weak unspecific K+¿carboxylate interactions have provedthemselves insufficient to explain some features of haloadaptation, such as the complex saltmodulationof enzymatic activity or the dependence of protein stability with Hofmeister anions.Figure I4. Halophilic amino acid composition. Residue abundance in halophilic proteins compared tomesophilic proteins expressed as the percentage of relative variation in the average amino acidcomposition

Technical assistance to assess the potential of renewable liquid and gaseous transport fuels of non-biological origin (RFNBOs) as well as recycled carbon fuels (RCFs), to establish a methodology to determine the share of renewable energy from RFNBOs as well as to develop a framework on additionality in the transport sector

This report is a summary of the work conducted in Task 1 of the technical assistance to assess the potential of renewable fuels of non-biological origin (RFNBOs) and recycled carbon fuels (RCFs) to establish a methodology to determine the share of renewable energy from RFNBOs as well as to develop a framework on additionality in the transport sector. The goal of Task 1 within the entire project was the assessment of the deployment potential of RFNBOs and RCFs over the period from 2020 to 2050 in the EU transport sector. All relevant transport sub-sectors and modalities are considered: road transport, maritime and inland shipping, aviation, and railway. Furthermore, the competition for RFNBOs and RCFs between the transport sectors and other sectors and applications of RFNBOs is considered. A central result is the potential gross final consumption of RFNBOs and RCFs that would count towards the RES target in the transport sector. In addition, the needed resources and the arising costs for this deployment as well as the impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and local environments are analyzed. Finally, barriers to the deployment and options to overcome these are outlined

Sustainability in peptide chemistry: current synthesis and purification technologies and future challenges.

Developing greener synthesis processes is an inescapable necessity to transform the industrial landscape, mainly in the pharmaceutical sector, into a long-term, sustainable reality. In this context, the renaissance of peptides as medical treatments, and the enforcement of more stringent sustainability requirements by regulatory agencies, pushed chemists toward the introduction of sustainable processes to prepare highly pure, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Innovative upstream (synthesis) and downstream (purification) methodologies have been developed during the last 5 years with the introduction and optimization of several technologies in solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS), liquid-phase peptide synthesis (LPPS), chemoenzymatic peptide synthesis (CEPS), and chromatographic procedures. These innovations are also moving toward the introduction of continuous processes that represent one of the most important targets for iterative processes. This overview discusses the most recent efforts in making peptide chemistry greener. The extensive studies that were carried out on green solvents, reaction conditions, auxiliary reagents and purification technologies in the peptide segment can be useful to other fields of organic synthesi

Acoustic Emission Monitoring of Wind Turbine Bearings

Climate change, national and international targets and a possible impending fuel scarcity is driving the need for a clean, cheap and sustainable energy source. Although onshore wind is currently the most economically viable source of renewable energy, high failure rates often occurring many years prior to their design life, are increasing the cost through additional maintenance and downtime. The gearbox, and in particular the bearings within the gearbox are the components responsible for the largest proportion of downtime. Field studies have shown damage to the inner race of the planetary support bearings found in the epicyclic stage of the gearbox is restricted to an arc of approximately 40° centered on the point of maximum load. Engineers at Ricardo have designed an actuation system to overcome this problem which allows the raceway to be rotated periodically thus distributing damage and increasing bearing life. The monitoring of planetary support bearings typically found in the epicyclic stage of wind turbine gearboxes has been investigated in this thesis using acoustic emission technology due to its reported increase in sensitivity in detecting damage at low speeds compared to vibration analysis in addition to its ability to locate damage. Primarily, accelerated life tests were performed on a rolling element bearing seeded with a defect mounted in a bespoke full scale test rig designed to mimic loading conditions experienced by the planetary support bearings. In addition, data was recorded and analysed from a split bearing test rig and the high speed shaft bearing of a recommissioned 600kW wind turbine gearbox. Initial experiments considered the influence of the lubrication regime on the measured acoustic emission signal. It was found that as the oil film reduces, asperity contact, typical of mixed or boundary lubrication, manifests itself as high amplitude transient events. Typical measures of bearing health in the time domain, such as peak values or kurtosis, become unreliable and demonstrates a need for a novel approach. Previous investigations into the use of acoustic emission for the purpose of bearing condition monitoring has focused on instances where full separation between bearing components occurred whereas this work considers a mixed lubrication regime. To overcome the drawbacks of the traditional measures, this work has investigated a process employing wavelet packet decomposition, autocorrelation and cepstrum to reduce the noise and boost the periodicity of a signal from a defected bearing. Outlier analysis was shown to be able to determine the presence of a seeded defect and indicate which bearing component is defected. Such approach was shown to provide a more robust measure than time domain methods. In contrast, this approach was compared to one employing time domain measures for a fully lubricated split bearing. In this case, a time domain approach was more successful at determining the presence of damage than the approach taken for the partially lubricated bearing. An attempt was made to improve the localisation of defects on a bearing which had, until now, relied on analytical time-of-flight methods. In this work artificial sources, rather than those resulting from a rolling element impinging on a defect, were generated by a standardised pencil lead break and used as training data for two methods namely Delta T mapping and neural networks. The neural networks in particular were shown to reduced the average error from 42mm to 17mm however given the time consuming nature of generating the training data a decision must be made regarding the relative importance of accuracy and ease of implementation