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

Fair enough: long-term prisoners talk about their sentence

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.

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 ;

Estonia’s Competition Policy: A Critical Evaluation towards EU accession.

This paper sets out to answer two questions: to what extend is competition policy in Estonia - one of the applicant countries for accession to the European Union - a duplication of EU policy, and has Estonia established a true competition discipline with high public awareness of the rules and effective public and private enforcement? It is shown that although Estonian antitrust policy includes some additional features to the core EU rules - both with possible positive and negative welfare consequences - one can basically really speak of a copy of EU policy both with respect to legislation and enforcement provisions. Since the EU has a long and successful tradition of fighting competition-distorting conduct, this should weigh positively in the country''s application for accession. However, a real competition discipline is still lacking in Estonia. Higher public awareness, as well as a more stringent enforcement and especially sanctioning policy are necessary.Economics ;