Designing GHG Emissions Trading Institutions in the Kyoto Protocol: an Experimental Approach.

We re-evaluate two experiments by Hizen and Saijo (1999a,b) to examine the performance of bilateral trading and double auction institutiions in GHG emissions trading.EXPERIMENTS ; ENVIRONEMENT ; NATURAL RESOURCES

Price Desclosure, Marginal Abatement Cost Information and Market Power in a Bilateral GHG Emissions Trading Experiment.

We conducted an experiment to examine the performance of the bilateral trading institution in GHG emissions trading. First, we found that the efficiency of bilateral trading is quite high, regardless of the disclosure or closure of contracted price and/or marginal abatement cost curve information. Second, marginal abatement costs are equalized over time. Third, on the other hand, contracted prices did not converge to the competitive price over time. Fourth, subjects who had market power did not use it.TRADE ; PRICES ; COSTS ; COMPETITION

Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: an International Comparison.

This paper studies public good provision in the laboratory using voluntary contribution mechanism, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan.EXPERIMENTS ; SOCIAL CHOICE ; PUBLIC GOODS

Who would get Gains from EU's Quantity Restraint on Emissions Trading in the Kyoto Protocol?.

The EU proposal on the quantity restraint of the emissions trading in the Kyoto Protocol aims at reducing the so called hot air that would be generated by the purchase of emissions permits sold by a country whose actual emissions are much lower than the assigned amount. In this paper we show that no quantity restraint of all demanders is not a subgame perfect equilibrium, but quantity restraints with a least one country constitute the equilibria.EXPERIMENTS ; ENVIRONMENT ; NATURAL RESOURCES

Guidelines for analysis and reporting of clinical trials in oncology.

When analyzing and reporting the results of clinical trials, investigators should follow a simple approach. The purpose of a trial is to estimate an effect or treatment difference, which if present would have clinical utility when treating new patients. Procedures or methods that do not facilitate precisely and impartially estimating and reporting the treatment effect are likely to mislead investigators. Most often in clinical trials, investigators are interested in estimates of risk ratios (specifically odds or hazard ratios) between the treatment groups or levels of a prognostic factor. These simple ideas suggest that the most useful results from clinical trials will be estimated risk ratios and their confidence limits. Especially in cancer, where disease progression, recurrence, and death are common events following treatment, estimates of risk difference are very relevant. Hypothesis tests and associated P-values, although often (or exclusively) reported, are of lesser utility because they do not fully summarize the data. These recommendations may be seen by some investigators to be contrary to accepted practice. It is true that they are somewhat contrary to common practice but their general acceptance is evident in many journals and presentations by clinical trial methodologists. Despite some disagreement among statisticians regarding the need for adjustment of analyses for imbalanced prognostic factors, it is helpful to see if treatment effects change after accounting for imbalances. When this occurs, it may be of clinical interest. Although we discourage analyses that exclude any patients who meet the eligibility criteria, some circumstances will require that this be done (e.g., when a patient refuses to participate after randomization). Investigators should report, and emphasize as primary, those analyses that include all eligible patients. It is our hope and belief that analysis and reporting of trial results along the guidelines suggested here will result in impartial and useful information for journal readers

A Four Country Comparision of Spite, Cooperation and Errors in Voluntary Contribution Mechanisms.

This paper presents data from experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries.EXPERIMENTS ; VOLUNTARY SERVICES ; PUBLIC GOODS

Voluntary Participation Game Experiments with a Non-Excludable Public Good: Is Spitefulness a Source of Cooperation?.

Economic theory predicts that it is impossible to have cooperation in finitely repeated games such as a prisoner's dilemma game without communication. In an experiment on a voluntary participation game with a non-excludable public good that is a version of a Hawk-Dove game, we obderved that evolutionary stable strategies did not appear, but cooperation emerged through a transmutation from the Hawk-Dove game to a game where a dominant strategy outcome is Pareto efficient.GAME THEORY ; EXPERIMENTS

The Outsider and Sunk Cost Effects on 'Dango' in Public Procurement Bidding: An Experimental Analysis.

This paper presents the result of experiments for finding some insight into an effect of the new bidding system in Japanese public construction works procurement on bidders' collusion, which is called 'dango'. We focused on an effect of the entry of an outsider who is not a dango member. The main conclusion of the experiments is that an outsider, a subject who is not allowed to communicate with other subjects, has a robust effect to prevent other subjects from colluding and to make the winning price decrease considerably.CONSTRUCTION ; PRICES ; BIDDING

Possible direct method to determine the radius of a star from the spectrum of gravitational wave signals

We computed the spectrum of gravitational waves from a dust disk star of radius R inspiraling into a Kerr black hole of mass M and specific angular momentum a. We found that when R is much larger than the wave length of the quasinormal mode, the spectrum has several peaks and the separation of peaks $\Delta\omega$ is proportional to $R^{-1}$ irrespective of M and a. This suggests that the radius of the star in coalescing binary black hole - star systems may be determined directly from the observed spectrum of gravitational wave. This also suggests that the spectrum of the radiation may give us important information in gravitational wave astronomy as in optical astronomy.Comment: 4 pages with 3 eps figures, revtex.sty, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let