Information, strategic behavior and fairness in ultimatum bargaining: An experimental study

Game Theory;Bargaining;Information

A Dynamic Game Approach to Analyze Buffer Stock Activities on Oligopolistic Markets

On oligopolistic markets with dynamic production functions one can often observe attempts toward cooperative agreements to "stabilize" prices. On the other hand, it is a well-known fact that cartel agreements are difficult to control, especially when the sellers come from different countries. In such a situation partial agreements -- for instance, founding a common marketing board -- seem more likely than detailed cartel agreements. In this paper we analyze the economic institution of a common buffer stock agency which can shift supply from present to future periods. Although the buffer stock agency determines the prices, individual production amounts are chosen independently by the sellers. We study the case of a price buffer stock agency which cannot produce, as well as the situation in which a major seller controls the buffer stock. One interesting result is that it makes quite an important difference whether the buffer stock agency is or is not able to produce. Loosely speaking one can say that only when the buffer stock is controlled by a producer do the other sellers not have to consider the future effects of present supply decisions

Interferometric Detection of Planets/Gaps in Protoplanetary Disks

We investigate the possibility to find evidence for planets in circumstellar disks by infrared and submillimeter interferometry. Hydrodynamical simulations of a circumstellar disk around a solar-type star with an embedded planet of 1 Jupiter mass are presented. On the basis of 3D radiative transfer simulations, images of this system are calculated. These intensity maps provide the basis for the simulation of the interferometers VLTI (equipped with the mid-infrared instrument MIDI) and ALMA. While ALMA will provide the necessary basis for a direct gap and therefore indirect planet detection, MIDI/VLTI will provide the possibility to distinguish between disks with or without accretion on the central star on the basis of visibility measurements.Comment: 4 pages, TeX (or Latex, etc); to appear in proceedings of "Scientific Frontiers in Research on Extrasolar Planets

Detecting planets in protoplanetary disks: A prospective study

We investigate the possibility to find evidence for planets in circumstellar disks by infrared and submillimeter interferometry. We present simulations of a circumstellar disk around a solar-type star with an embedded planet of 1 Jupiter mass. The three-dimensional (3D) density structure of the disk results from hydrodynamical simulations. On the basis of 3D radiative transfer simulations, images of this system were calculated. The intensity maps provide the basis for the simulation of the interferometers VLTI (equipped with the mid-infrared instrument MIDI) and ALMA. While MIDI/VLTI will not provide the possibility to distinguish between disks with or without a gap on the basis of visibility measurements, ALMA will provide the necessary basis for a direct gap detection.Comment: 5 page

Strategic Aspects of IIASA's Food and Agricultural Model

The linkage model of IIASA's Food and Agriculture Program (FAP) can be described as an econometric world model which investigates the interaction of many national economies on a number of agricultural markets and one residual nonagricultural market. The model contains a number of policy parameters which can be determined by the national governments in order to improve the economic results. Given that one can specify a goal function for every country, the IIASA linkage model can be thus viewed as a strategic game with the governments of the various countries as players. In this paper some of the strategic aspects of the IIASA linkage model are investigated. Reasons of analytic tractability made it advisable to study a radically simplified version with only two commodities, food and nonfood, and with rather simple assumptions on government objectives such as short-run minimization of the costs of agricultural policy. One of the major results is that under apparently weak restrictions on the parameters of our model it is an optimal policy for all countries to supply as much food as possible, which seems to contradict commonly held intuitions. Of course, one still has to determine whether the same result would hold for more complex models and whether the conditions would really be satisfied by econometrically specified model parameters. The basic reason for this counter-intuitive result in our game model is that demand is specified by linear expenditure systems. We therefore suggest alternative demand specifications, which would avoid the difficulties of linear expenditure systems