Gigabits through a slow wire

A centimetre may seem like nothing, but on a microchip it easily becomes an insurmountable distance. In order to transmit gigabits of data over this distance, Daniel Schinkel has had to pull out all the stops. Analog and digital technology come together in the Integrated Circuit Design group, which recently became part of the CTIT

Adaptation, the meaning of imprisonment and outcomes after release: the impact of the prison regime

No abstract available

Fair enough: long-term prisoners talk about their sentence

No abstract available

Book review: Young Offenders: Crime, Prison and Struggles for Desistance

No abstract available

Illinois Walls in alternative market structures

This note extends on our paper Illinois Walls: How barring indirect purchaser suits facilitates collusion (Schinkel, Tuinstra and Rüggeberg, 2005, henceforth STR). It presents analyses of two alternative, more competitive, market structures to conclude that when the conditions for existence of Illinois Walls derived in STR are satisfied, Illinois Walls also exist in these alternative market structures. Section 1 considers a market in which each downstream firm is able to buy and sell several varieties of the differentiated product, which increases competition at the downstream level. It is found that Illinois Walls then exist for discount factors higher than a certain critical discount factor, where this critical discount factor is strictly smaller than the critical discount value found in STR. Section 2 studies the case where all wholesalers produce one and the same homogeneous input, which the downstream firms each differentiate into their own variety. In this market structure, competition is strong at the upstream level. Illinois Walls turn out to exist for any positive value of the discount factor. These findings suggest that Illinois Walls are robust to variations in market structure.

Forced Freebies: A Note on Partial Deregulation with Pro Bono Supply Requirements

The liberalization of many former state governed natural monopolies in sectors such as electricity, railroad and telecommunications is done by partial deregulation. Typically, entry is invited into elements of the production chain, yet under strict price and quality controls. This note considers some potential welfare effects of an unconventional type of conditional deregulation, used in the electricity market in Flanders, Belgium, where the utility companies are held to deliver the households they supply a complimentary basic electricity package free of charge. It is shown that, while decreasing the number of new entrants into the liberalized market, such pro bono supply requirements can nevertheless increase net total production. A general condition for a welfare maximizing level of `forced freebies' is derived.

Imperfect Competition Law Enforcement

Competition policy is a subject of often heated debate. Competition authorities, seeking to battle anticompetitive acts in complex cases to the best of their abilities, regularly find themselves advised by rival economic theories and disputed empirical analyses. As a consequence, there is a real possibility that they may occasionally err, missing true violations of competition law or finding firms liable that have actually done nothing but good competition. In this paper, possible consequences of such imperfect competition law enforcement on firm strategies are considered. In a simple cartel setting, it is found that the incidence of anti-competitive behavior increases in both types of enforcement errors: Type II errors decrease expected fines, while Type I errors encourage industries to collude precautionary when they face the risk of false allegations. Hence, fallible antitrust enforcement may stifle genuine competition. Moreover, when enforcement error are non-negligible, competition authorities run the risk of being over-zealous, in the sense that welfare is best served by an authority that is selective in its targeting of alleged anticompetitive acts.

Recurrence Plots 25 years later -- gaining confidence in dynamical transitions

Recurrence plot based time series analysis is widely used to study changes and transitions in the dynamics of a system or temporal deviations from its overall dynamical regime. However, most studies do not discuss the significance of the detected variations in the recurrence quantification measures. In this letter we propose a novel method to add a confidence measure to the recurrence quantification analysis. We show how this approach can be used to study significant changes in dynamical systems due to a change in control parameters, chaos-order as well as chaos-chaos transitions. Finally we study and discuss climate transitions by analysing a marine proxy record for past sea surface temperature. This paper is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the introduction of recurrence plots

Long Live OPTA!

Although explicitly installed as a transitory body, the Dutch telecommunication controller OPTA displays the typical signs of government institutions that seek to become indispensable. A conflict in OPTA''s two main policy objectives – guarding consumer prices through controlling the network operator and encouraging entry into the telecommunication market – hinders OPTA in making itself redundant. It is shown that a market structure with a dominant owner of the network and a few fringe firms, among which OPTA referees for ever, is a stable Nash equilibrium. Some possible remedies for this undesirable state of affairs are discussed. Long live OPTA, but leaner and meaner, supervising a symmetrically competing market.Economics ;