This dissertation focuses on the spatial aspects of oil and natural gas production to investigate the extent and effects of inefficient and unnecessary spatial competition. Because oil and natural gas are migratory, operators can cause hydrocarbon resources to flow from a neighboring property onto his or her own through rapid extraction. This problem is compounded when productive leases are comparatively small, as is the case in Texas. Following an introduction and literature review, the third chapter takes advantage of a natural experiment to demonstrate how spillovers in production limit total cumulative recovery, and how the assignment of secure property rights can enhance economic outcomes. The chapter examines production from wells in Oklahoma and Texas near the panhandle border. While wells on either side of this line have similar geologies and so should be similarly productive they are exposed to different treatments: Oklahoma has a much higher rate of unitization (a contractual scheme where competing owners hire a common operator and share profits), whereas the unitization rate in Texas is lower. Using regression discontinuity design, I find that Oklahoma wells are produced more slowly early on, and that this results in greater cumulative recovery over the course of a well’s life (150% more relative to Texas). These results are robust after controlling for reservoir specific effects, and across parametric, semi-parametric and nonparametric specifications. xiiThe fourth chapter quantifies the degree to which competing owners interfere with each other’s production through spatial spillovers. I use a spatial econometric model that controls for spatial autocorrelation and spatial dependence and can therefore identify the spillovers in production. Additionally, by comparing leases owned by competing producers to leases owned by a common producer, I show empirically how securing property rights through common ownership can alleviate the externality in production. A priori, one would expect that when a common producer owns adjacent leases, the producer has the incentive to fully account for how spillovers in production affect neighboring wells. Conversely, when adjacent landowners are in competition to extract the resource, they will not account for the damage rapid production causes at neighboring wells. After controlling for secondary injection I find that this is indeed the case for Slaughter field of West Texas. The fifth chapter investigates the statistical properties of oil and natural gas production. I find striking evidence that both oil and natural gas production are power-law distributed with the exponent approximately equal to one. This distribution might arise from disequilibrium in production and exploration. Highlighting this distribution is important because it has potential consequences for the political economy of regulation as well as for resource management. For example, because the most productive wells lie in the far-right tail of the distribution, regulation geared to prevent a Deepwater Horizon scale spill need fall on a vanishingly small percent of wells. The distribution also has consequences for management because a company profitability depends disproportionately on how it manages its most productive wells. The sixth chapter provides a short conclusion.

The e-book reader has become one of the most popular consumer electronics goods since the Amazon Kindle first launched in the end of year 2007; it has led the trend of e-book worldwide. E-book reader not only sold very well in North America, the sales increased very fast in Asia and Europe. According to FIND (2010), the global total sales of e-book reader is 3.6 million pieces in 2009, and it increased almost 80% in 2010. This shows that the e-book reader has become more and more popular. Taiwan is the most important country of e-book reader supply chain, which not only predominate the key techniques and patent but also takes OEM / ODM orders worldwide. Despite the advantage of the hardware development, the use of e-book readers is not common in Taiwan. Therefore the purposes of this research are to explore the factors that would influence user¡¦s adaptive behavior of e-book readers. This research based on technology acceptance model (TAM), and extends with ¡§Compatibility¡¨, ¡§Observability¡¨ and ¡§Perceived complementarity¡¨ as external variables to investigate the factors influencing consumer usage of e-book reader. The analytical results are as below: 1. ¡§Compatibility¡¨ has positive significant effect on both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use.¡¨ 2. ¡§Observability¡¨ has positive significant effect on both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use.¡¨ 3. ¡§Perceived complementarity¡¨ has positive significant effect on both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use,¡¨ but has no significant effect on¡§Behavioral Intention.¡¨ 4. Both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use¡¨ have positive significant effect on¡§Behavioral Intention.¡¨

This paper is a combination of spatial duopoly model together with consumption externality model. Under the circumstance of heterogeneous products, I will discuss separately the influence of consumption externalities on the optimal equilibrium strategy of the firm. When consumers are characterized with the snob, the equilibrium price tends to be higher; however, consumers are characterized with the conformity, firms will be fierce price competition. Moreover, given the existence of conspicuous goods, consumers purchase a conspicuous good in order to display their relative high income and thereby achieve greater social status. And for this type of conspicuous consumers, the government will generally levy a luxury tax or even prohibit the consumption of the conspicuous good. And finally, by comparing these two cases with the laissez-faire economy, changes in the social welfare are exactly in an opposite direction.

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This paper uses the optimal control theory to construct dynamic economic model. The primary purpose of this paper is to discuss how different policies alter the choice problem of the firm and influence the allocation of funds to existing and new research and development activities. I analyze how the fixed-cost regulatory standard and the marginal-cost standard let firm consider externality, in order to protect the consumer of asymmetric information and avoid the problem of adverse selection. The firm maximizes expected profit. At the same time I want to know how the consumer acceptance, mark and audit affect the farmer to purchase the quantity of seed and the allocation of funds . We want to discuss how different price influence the option input path, the option quantity path and the option path . I discuss the different between ultimatum and static model. Finally, I discuss dynamic models in this paper to find out whether there exists a long-term and stable steady state. Saddle-point stability exists under certain restrictions.

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The thesis aims to describe main relationships between road traffic and its environmental impact. It has to explain general concept, definition of basic negatives and disadvantages of the road traffic environmental influence and ways how to face up to them. One of fundamental components of the thesis is represented by an chapter about road traffic's external costs and possible approaches of their elimination. It pushes ahead the internalizing externalities. Analytic part of the thesis refers to one concrete traffic fabric situated in the centre of medium-sized city with a view to changes of environment characteristics of the whole territory and to changes of traffic situation in the city. The fabric is monitored in the course of all phases -- from first suggestions for the final commissioning.

This theses presents a discussion on the symbiotic relationship between the economic development and environmental protection. The presentation is based upon an extensive literature overview with a strong focus on Chinese research publications.

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No description available.