Reliance Investments, Expectation Damages and Hidden Information

A setting of reliance investments is explored where one of the parties to a contract obtains private information concerning his utility or cost function that remains hidden to the other party and to courts. As a consequence, it will be a difficult task to award expectation damages corrrectly to a party with private information who sufffers from breach of contract. While a revelation mechanism would exist that leads to the first best solution, assessing expectation damages correctly turns out to be at odds with ex post efficiency. I conclude that, under asymmetric information, the performance of expectation damages falls short of what more general mechanisms could achieve

Legal Damages for Losses of Chances

This paper deals with legal damages if losses of chances are at stake. In response to disparate ad hoc rules that have emerged from legal practice in Europe, the present paper proposes a unifying principle to handle such cases. Quite generally, the purpose of a damages award is to compensate the claimant and should be based on the difference in value between due performance and actual performance. To cope with limited observability, it is suggested to still award the difference though on average over the observed event. The paper calculates damages in line with this general principle. The proposed damage scheme is shown to fully compensate the victim and to provide efficient incentives for precaution, be it that multiple injurers act non-cooperatively or in concert, even if losses of chances are at stake

Cooperative Investments Induced by Contract Law

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004This paper revisits the economic analysis of contract law for a setting of cooperative investments. While Che and Chung (1999) have shown that expectation damages perform rather poorly, the present paper argues that this negative result follows from their impicit assumption of unilateral expectation damages. Yet, the very nature of cooperative investments gives rise to the possibility that both parties may claim expectation damages. It is shown that such a regime of bilateral expectation damages provides the incentives for the first best solution even in a framework of binary choice where, for selfish investments, the traditional overreliance result would hold

Simulation of nanostructure-based and ultra-thin film solar cell devices beyond the classical picture

In this paper, an optoelectronic device simulation framework valid for arbitrary spatial variation of electronic potentials and optical modes, and for transport regimes ranging from ballistic to diffusive, is used to study non-local photon absorption, photocurrent generation and carrier extraction in ultra-thin film and nanostructure-based solar cell devices at the radiative limit. Among the effects that are revealed by the microscopic approach and which are inaccessible to macroscopic models is the impact of structure, doping or bias induced nanoscale potential variations on the local photogeneration rate and the photocarrier transport regime.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

Theoretical investigation of direct and phonon-assisted tunneling currents in InAlGaAs-InGaAs bulk and quantum well interband tunnel junctions for multi-junction solar cells

Direct and phonon-assisted tunneling currents in InAlGaAs-InGaAs bulk and double quantum well interband tunnel heterojunctions are simulated rigorously using the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism for coherent and dissipative quantum transport in combination with a simple two-band tight-binding model for the electronic structure. A realistic band profile and associated built-in electrostatic field is obtained via self-consistent coupling of the transport formalism to Poisson's equation. The model reproduces experimentally observed features in the current-voltage characteristics of the device, such as the structure appearing in the negative differential resistance regime due to quantization of emitter states. Local maps of density of states and current spectrum reveal the impact of quasi-bound states, electric fields and electron-phonon scattering on the interband tunneling current. In this way, resonances appearing in the current through the double quantum well structure in the negative differential resistance regime can be related to the alignment of subbands in the coupled quantum wells.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

The contribution of research to the development of organic farming in Europe

On national as well as on EU level, research funds should be directed substantially towards organic farming in order to improve the economic and ecological performance of organic farming. The impact of research funds is very high in this field of food production, because, as yet, the potential of organic farming has been scarcely tapped by research. Integrating organic farming research into conventional research structures means disintegrating organic farming itself. Therefore, special attention should be given to how research activities are organised. National or regional centres of competence (hubs) are needed in order to provide and maintain an appropriate quality of research. These hubs can be organised as real or virtual centres. Evaluation procedures for most national and EU research funds do not consider adequately the unique approach and methodology of organic farming research

Quantum-kinetic perspective on photovoltaic device operation in nanostructure-based solar cells

The implementation of a wide range of novel concepts for next-generation high-efficiency solar cells is based on nanostructures with configuration-tunable optoelectronic properties. On the other hand, effective nano-optical light-trapping concepts enable the use of ultra-thin absorber architectures. In both cases, the local density of electronic and optical states deviates strongly from that in a homogeneous bulk material. At the same time, non-local and coherent phenomena like tunneling or ballistic transport become increasingly relevant. As a consequence, the semi-classical, diffusive bulk picture conventionally assumed may no longer be appropriate to describe the physical processes of generation, transport, and recombination governing the photovoltaic operation of such devices. In this review, we provide a quantum-kinetic perspective on photovoltaic device operation that reaches beyond the limits of the standard simulation models for bulk solar cells. Deviations from bulk physics are assessed in ultra-thin film and nanostructure-based solar cell architectures by comparing the predictions of the semi-classical models for key physical quantities such as absorption coefficients, emission spectra, generation and recombination rates as well as potentials, densities and currents with the corresponding properties as given by a more fundamental description based on non-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics. This advanced approach, while paving the way to a comprehensive quantum theory of photovoltaics, bridges simulations at microscopic material and macroscopic device levels by providing the charge carrier dynamics at the mesoscale.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures; review article based on an invited talk at the MRS Spring Meeting 2017 in Phoeni