Linkage and Multilevel Governance

Economic models of emissions trading implicitly assume a simple unitary governance structure, where a single regulator designs and enforces an emissions trading program. The Kyoto Protocol, however, employs a multilevel governance structure in which international, regional, national, sub-national, and even private actors have significant roles in designing and enforcing the trading program. Under this structure, international trading of credits requires complex linking of disparate regional, national, and subnational trading program. This paper describes the multilevel governance model employed in the Kyoto Protocol and then analyzes some of the problems this complexity creates for the project of creating an international market in environmental benefit credits to realize technology transfer benefits. This paper shows that multilevel governance creates costs that can interfere with technology transfer and free trade in credits. It concludes that rules sufficiently stringent to encourage technology transfer in the face of significant additionality problems will likely burden free trade in credits. Unfortunately, rules sufficiently relaxed to make international transactions simple and problem free will lack integrity and spawn non-additional credits greatly limiting the Kyoto Protocol\u27s potential as a technology transfer mechanism. The paper suggests that these governance complexities counsel against automatic embrace of linkage

Singularities at rims in three-dimensional fluid flow

Asymptotic solutions are presented for Stokes flow near circular rims in three-dimensional geometries. Using nonstandard toroidal coordinates, asymptotic analytical expressions are derived for different corner angles. In comparison to the two-dimensional case, an extra critical corner angle value is derived, below which the swirling behaviour of a particle is absent. Illustrations of the motion of a particle near a rim in a three-dimensional fluid flow are given for different corner angles

Mass transport in a partially covered fluid-filled cavity

A method of computing the concentration field of dissolved material inside an etch-hole is presented. Using a number of assumptions, approximate convection-diffusion equations are formulated, and analytical descriptions for the concentration in different parts of the domain are obtained. By coupling these descriptions the concentration field can be computed. The assumptions and the results are validated by comparison with solutions based on a finite-volume method. Results of the boundary-layer method are given for two characteristic etch-hole geometries. The described boundary-layer method is efficient in terms of computational time and memory, because it does not require the construction of a computational grid in the interior of the domain. This advantage will be exploited in a future paper where the method will be used to simulate wet-chemical etching

Continuous fictitious play in zero-sum games

Robinson (1951) showed that the learning process of Discrete Fictitious Play converges from any initial condition to the set of Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games. In several earlier works, Brown (1949, 1951) makes some heuristic arguments for a similar convergence result for the case of Continuous Fictitious Play (CFP). The standard reference for a formal proof is Harris (1998); his argument requires several technical lemmas, and moreover, involves the advanced machinery of Lyapunov functions. In this note we present a simple alternative proof. In particular, we show that Brown''s convergence result follows easily from a result obtained by Monderer et al. (1997).mathematical economics;

A non-cooperative foundation for the continuous Raiffa solution

This paper provides a non-cooperative foundation for (asymmetric generalizations of) the continuous Raiffa solution. Specifically, we consider a continuous-time variation of the classic Ståhl–Rubinstein bargaining model, in which there is a finite deadline that ends the negotiations, and in which each player’s opportunity to make proposals is governed by a player-specific Poisson process, in that the rejecter of a proposal becomes proposer at the first next arrival of her process. Under the assumption that future payoffs are not discounted, it is shown that the expected payoffs players realize in subgame perfect equilibrium converge to the continuous Raiffa solution outcome as the deadline tends to infinity. The weights reflecting the asymmetries among the players correspond to the Poisson arrival rates of their respective proposal processes

Extended Iterative Scheme for QCD: the Four-Gluon Vertex

We study the self-consistency problem of the generalized Feynman rule (nonperturbatively modified vertex of zeroth perturbative order) for the 4-gluon vertex function in the framework of an extended perturbation scheme accounting for non-analytic coupling dependence through the Lambda scale. Tensorial structure is restricted to a minimal dynamically closed basis set. The self-consistency conditions are obtained at one loop, in Landau gauge, and at the lowest approximation level (r=1) of interest for QCD. At this level, they are found to be linear in the nonperturbative 4-gluon coefficients, but strongly overdetermined due to the lack of manifest Bose symmetry in the relevant Dyson-Schwinger equation. The observed near decoupling from the 2-and-3-point conditions permits least-squares quasisolutions for given 2-and-3-point input within an effective one-parameter freedom. We present such solutions for N_F=2 massless quarks and for the pure gluon theory, adapted to the 2-and-3-point coefficients determined previously.Comment: 46 pages, 11 figure

BIOTECH IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: FROM A GENE REVOLUTION TO A DOUBLY GREEN REVOLUTION?

International Development, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,