State-Owned Enterprise, Mixed Oligopoly and Entry

We analyse state-owned enterprise (SOE) behaviour under pure and mixed oligopoly. An industry comprising at least two SOEs is shown not to have a symmetric stable equilibrium. This suggests the need for planning in such industries. For mixed oligopoly, we assume that an SOE has a cost disadvantage. When fixed costs must be sunk before entry, free entry implies that, if the SOE cost disadvantage is not too large, the presence of an SOE is immaterial for welfare (there is no welfare gain from privatisation). Similarly, a free-entry all-private oligopoly is welfare-superior to a public monopoly only if endowed with a significant cost advantage.state-owned enterprise, mixed oligopoly, privatisation

University libraries as active agents for change. The BitViews Project : how University librarians can turn all journals green and clear the path to open science

There can be no open science without Open Access (OA). This paper is a call to arms to individual University librarians to make a decisive move towards open access. The short-term objective of OA is defined as the immediate, cost-free, online access to the content of all peer reviewed scientific, medical, and scholarly articles. This amounts to unrestricted access to the author’s approved manuscripts (AAMs) deposited in institutional and other repositories. Even in the current academic publishing ecosystem, largely directed and managed by a few oligopolistic commercial publishers, 80% of peer reviewed articles can be deposited as AAMs, but only a small minority of researchers choose to do so. The reason for this failure is that currently there are no individual incentives for researchers to promote their AAMs, as the main currency of academic recognition and esteem (the citation count) resides with published articles. The author has described elsewhere how an open-source blockchain application (BitViews) can collect, validate, and disseminate at minimal cost online usage data of all AAMs available on institutional repositories. The resulting public ledger of usage data can be used to arrange discipline-specific non-citation research impact measures thereby providing the incentive for more authors to deposit their AAMs in a virtuous circle. The green OA thus achieved allows researchers in the global South to enter scholarly communication not only as consumers but also as producers of peer-reviewed knowledge. BitViews Project allows individual university libraries to be catalysts for change. The paper explains how a novel application of game theory (conditional crowdfunding) will empower individual libraries to spread the relatively miniscule costs of setting up BitViews using a two-stage mechanism that minimises free-riding and offers a no-risk opportunity to libraries to deploy their institutional repositories not just as stores of information, but as active tools to achieve open access.Publisher PD

Patents, market structure and welfare: A theoretical investigation into new dimensions of the patent system.

Chapter I: The relationship between inventor and the Patent Office is modelled as a 'patent regulation game' and it is shown that the conventional wisdom that the P.O. always maximizes welfare by playing the Stackelberg leader is incorrect. Other solution concepts are explored and it is found that, because of the patent life constraint, a reversal of roles may be beneficial. The result that social welfare can be maximized by the P.O. being a Stackelberg follower survives (albeit for a narrower range of values of the key parameters) even if the P.O.-leader is endowed with the additional instrument of a compulsory royalty rate. Chapter II: A new twist is added to the debate on the Schumpeterian competition hypothesis, by considering the structure of the final-product market as a policy Instrument, set by the Patent Office by manipulating patentability standards. It is found that for a vast range of demand functions and under constant returns to scale, a patentability standard that allows for more than one patent to be granted within a given product/process class is welfare superior to the monopoly-generating first-past-the-post current system. If patent life is beyond the P.O.'s control and/or there are increasing returns, no patentability standard is unambiguously preferable. Chapter III: When Research and Development are modelled as two analytically distinct stages, the choice between patentability standards (whether to grant patents to research prototypes or to fully-developed products) is shown to affect the allocation of resources between Research and Development. It is shown that under a single-patent regime, granting patents to research prototypes is unambiguously welfare-improving, whereas under a multiple-patent regime a change to patents being granted to fully-developed products and the attending increase in market uncertainty may raise welfare. Chapter IV: The economics of the 'integer constraint' is analysed and it is found that proper treatment of the indivisibility of firms may reverse the qualitative conclusions of interger-unconstrained models. As an example, a product quality oligopoly model is examined and it is shown that not only the Chamberlinian excess entry result does not apply but also that a free-entry oligopoly and a socially managed industry may produce goods of identical quality, irrespective of the values of cross-derivatives deemed crucial in the literature. Moreover, the integer constraint is shown to provide an explanation for a positive correlation between profitability and concentration in a Cournot oligopoly model with free entry

Mixed oligopoly, public firm behavior, and free private entry

© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reservedWe analyze a mixed oligopoly with free entry by private firms, assuming that a public firm maximizes an increasing function of output, subject to a break-even constraint. We establish an irrelevance result: whenever a mixed oligopoly is viable, then aggregate output, aggregate costs and welfare are the same with and without the public firm. However, replacing a viable mixed oligopoly with a public monopoly yields higher net welfare. Implications for privatization policy are suggested

The fundamental problem blocking open access and how to overcome it : the BitViews project

In our view the fundamental obstacle to open access (OA) is the lack of any incentive-based mechanism that unbundles authors’ accepted manuscripts (AMs) from articles (VoRs). The former can be seen as the public good that ought to be openly accessible, whereas the latter is owned by publishers and rightly paywall-restricted. We propose one such mechanism to overcome this obstacle: BitViews. BitViews is a blockchain-based application that aims to revolutionize the OA publishing ecosystem. Currently, the main academic currency of value is the citation. There have been attempts in the past to create a second currency whose measure is the online usage of research materials (e.g., PIRUS). However, these have failed due to two problems. Firstly, it has been impossible to find a single agency willing to co-ordinate and fund the validation and collation of global online usage data. Secondly, online usage metrics have lacked transparency in how they filter non-human online activity. BitViews is a novel solution which uses blockchain technology to bypass both problems: online AM usage will be recorded on a public, distributed ledger, obviating the need for a central responsible agency, and the rules governing activity-filtering will be part of the open-source BitViews blockchain application, creating complete transparency. Once online AM usage has measurable value, researchers will be incentivized to promote and disseminate AMs. This will fundamentally re-orient the academic publishing ecosystem. A key feature of BitViews is that its success (or failure) is wholly and exclusively in the hands of the worldwide community of university and research libraries, as we suggest that it ought to be financed by conditional crowdfunding, whereby the actual financial commitment of each contributing library depends on the total amount raised. If the financing target is not reached, then all contributions are returned in full and if the target is over-fulfilled, then the surplus is returned pro rata.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

What flowers can bloom in a green open access landscape? Imaging a future with BitViews

BitViews is a blockchain application that collects, validates, and aggregates worldwide online usage data of author’s approved manuscripts (AAMs) deposited in Open Access Institutional Repositories. It creates a free public ledger of usage events that allows anyone to see which research outputs have been accessed, where, and when, thus providing the raw material to construct discipline- and region-specific non-citation based measures of research impact. BitViews’ short-term implications include: 1. The re-alignment of journal impact measures (from citations to usage); 2. Changed patterns in the production of research articles (towards high-usage topics); 3. Creation of new networks of research collaboration; 4. Enhanced opportunity for open data sharing. BitViews’ long-term effects are transformative. Because BitViews promotes the “unbundling” of AAMs from published articles, it endows AAMs with independent value. Two disruptive consequences follow: the very concept of APCs is undermined and the conditions are created for the academy to regain ownership of peer review. Relegating commercial publishers to the role of providers of post-AAM services, huge resources will be released. As soon as AAMs are de‐coupled from articles, the same process and infrastructure can be applied to research monographs, thereby completing the cycle of Open Access to the whole production of knowledge.Publisher PD

What flowers can bloom in a green open access landscape? Imaging a future with BitViews

BitViews is a blockchain application that collects, validates, and aggregates worldwide online usage data of author’s approved manuscripts (AAMs) deposited in Open Access Institutional Repositories. It creates a free public ledger of usage events that allows anyone to see which research outputs have been accessed, where, and when, thus providing the raw material to construct discipline- and region-specific non-citation based measures of research impact.BitViews’ short-term implications include:1. The re-alignment of journal impact measures (from citations to usage);2. Changed patterns in the production of research articles (towards high-usage topics);3. Creation of new networks of research collaboration;4. Enhanced opportunity for open data sharing.BitViews’ long-term effects are transformative. Because BitViews promotes the “unbundling” of AAMs from published articles, it endows AAMs with independent value. Two disruptive consequences follow: the very concept of APCs is undermined and the conditions are created for the academy to regain ownership of peer review. Relegating commercial publishers to the role of providers of post-AAM services, huge resources will be released. As soon as AAMs are de‐coupled from articles, the same process and infrastructure can be applied to research monographs, thereby completing the cycle of Open Access to the whole production of knowledge

The Hidden Surplus From Research Joint Ventures: An Application Of Systems Reliability Theory

The paper’s aim is two fold: (a) to model some key features of the research process as a multi-component system, as understood by the mathematical theory of systems reliability; and (b) to apply the resulting model to Research Joint Ventures, showing that a potentially very large surplus can be realized purely by organizing research efficiently, i.e. even without any changes in R&D investment.optimal organization, systems reliability, Research Joint Ventures, parallel and series systems, majorization, organizational surplus.

The Surprising Benefits of a Parellel Universe

optimal organization, parallel multi-tasking, majorization.