7,975 research outputs found
Why did British Electricity Prices Fall after 1998?
In an attempt to reduce high electricity prices in England and Wales the government has reduced concentration among generators and introduced New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA). Econometric analysis on monthly data from April 1996 to September 2002 implies support for two conflicting hypotheses. On a static view, increases in competition and the capacity margin were chiefly responsible for the fall in prices. If generators had been tacitly colluding before NETA, however, the impending change in market rules might have changed their behaviour a few months before the abolition of the Pool. That view implies that NETA reduced prices
Why did British electricity prices fall after 1998?
In an attempt to reduce high electricity prices in England and Wales the government has reduced concentration among generators and introduced New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA). Econometric analysis on monthly data from April 1996 to September 2002 implies support for two conflicting hypotheses. On a static view, increases in competition and the capacity margin were chiefly responsible for the fall in prices. If generators had been tacitly colluding before NETA, however, the impending change in market rules might have changed their behaviour a few months before the abolition of the Pool. That view implies that NETA reduced prices.electricity, market power, concentration, market rules
Jamming transitions and avalanches in the game of Dots-and-Boxes
We study the game of Dots-and-Boxes from a statistical point of view. The
early game can be treated as a case of Random Sequential Adsorption, with a
jamming transition that marks the beginning of the end-game. We derive set of
differential equations to make predictions about the state of the lattice at
the transition, and thus about the distribution of avalanches in the end-game.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, revtex
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The importance of including habitat-specific behaviour in models of butterfly movement
Dispersal is a key process affecting population persistence and major factors affecting dispersal rates are the amounts, connectedness and properties of habitats in landscapes. We present new data on the butterfly Maniola jurtina in flower-rich and flower-poor habitats that demonstrates how movement and behaviour differ between sexes and habitat types, and how this effects consequent dispersal rates. Females had higher flight speeds than males but their total time in flight was four times less. The effect of habitat type was strong for both sexes, flight speeds were ~2.5x and ~1.7x faster on resource-poor habitats for males and females respectively, and flights were approximately 50% longer. With few exceptions females oviposited in the mown grass habitat, likely because growing grass offers better food for emerging caterpillars, but they foraged in the resource-rich habitat. It seems that females faced a trade-off between ovipositing without foraging in the mown grass or foraging without ovipositing where flowers were abundant. We show that taking account of habitat-dependent differences in activity, here categorised as flight or non-flight, is crucial to obtaining good fits of an individual-based model to observed movement. An important implication of this finding is that incorporating habitat-specific activity budgets is likely necessary for predicting longer-term dispersal in heterogeneous habitats as habitat-specific behaviour substantially influences the mean (>30% difference) and kurtosis (1.4x difference) of dispersal kernels. The presented IBMs provide a simple method to explicitly incorporate known activity and movement rates when predicting dispersal in changing and heterogeneous landscapes
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Anthropology and Moral Philosophy: A Symposium on Michael Banner's The Ethics of Everyday Life
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