The electric vehicle (EV) has been regarded as one of the most promising alternative fuel vehicle technologies that could reduce China’s energy reliance on imported oil and transport sector carbon emissions. The success of EVs in China will depend on a series of determinants including their energy consumption and emission reduction potentials, battery performance and costs, charging infrastructure provision, the driving behaviour and the commercialization strategies. Some issues have been intensively investigated by previous research whilst some others gradually receive academic and governmental attentions. Instead of covering all determinants, this thesis focuses on four key aspects of the electric car development in China: the energy consumption and carbon emissions of electric cars based on the country’s energy mix; the expected electric car driving behaviour and its impacts on the power grid; the deployment strategy of charging infrastructure and the business operation models that could reduce the purchase cost of electric cars and accelerate their market diffusion. The research finds that according to the current energy mix and driving behaviour in China, the introduction of electric cars would largely reduce the transport sectors’ oil consumption. However, the carbon emission saving of electric cars requires a synchronized progress in the energy industry and the power grid infrastructure. Without the growing adoption of renewable sources in the electricity generation mix and the high efficient power transmission infrastructure, electric cars could achieve little environmental benefits particularly for carbon emission reduction. This research also finds that the current external costs of carbon emissions from cars are not high enough to justify financial policies that would favour electric vehicles. Moving towards cleaner technologies at present may not be justified on economic terms but it is justified on political and environmental terms. In addition, the performance of current electric cars, the driving range per charge in particular, is still significantly inferior to conventional vehicles running on petroleum fuels, which poses a remarkable challenge for electric cars’ market acceptance and implies the importance of charging infrastructure provision. This research estimates the charging impact of electric cars on the power grid in two case study cities through comparing charging infrastructure deployment strategies integrating three charging methods in both cities. Some innovative business operating models that aim to reduce the high initial purchase costs of electric cars are simulated. It shows all these models require substantial political and financial interventions to stimulate both supply (charging service and infrastructure provision) and demand (consumers purchase) in the early stage of market penetration for electric cars. Finally, the thesis provides recommendations for the policy implementation timing and stresses the importance of the parallel development in the upstream low carbon energy supply and the downstream vehicle (battery) research and development (R&D) in the near term.

Stable networks of cooperation, through which persons act under assumptions of reciprocity, promise-keeping and trust, are necessary for any society to flourish. These relationships have been described as “social capital”, defined as the norms and networks that enable collective action. Whilst study of social capital has generated much attention from those interested in its consequences for economic development and social unity, there remains a certain gap within the social sciences between homo economicus assumptions of self-motivated behaviour and manifestations of social capital. This invites analysis into the causes of social capital, which is the question taken up in this thesis. Asking what necessary conditions facilitate social capital’s emergence, this study analyses trustful relationships in urban Kenya and Tanzania. Urban living acts as a litmus test to trust relations and helps expose the necessary forces for social capital’s creation. Alongside this, the research sites of Kenya and Tanzania assisted in controlling for historical and cultural factors that may blur causal accounts of social capital. The two countries share similarities in their political, social and economic histories and, at the same time, exhibit diverging political emphases since independence and resulting levels of citizen-on-citizen trust. The country-level similarities and differences thus help contrast the lower levels of urban trust found in Kenya against the higher levels found in Tanzania, allowing in-depth examination of the conditions that support social capital’s emergence. Evidence is offered firstly through qualitative exploration of the formation of trustful relationships in economically competitive scenarios. Study of a single social network of plastic-bag sellers in Mwanza, Tanzania, reveals the importance of early anchors of trust as zones of reputation-indication. The comparative experiences of local market-sellers in Kisumu, Kenya, and Mwanza, Tanzania, support understanding higher levels of trust to pervade in Tanzania than in Kenya, and evaluate the influence of ethnic homogeneity for community solidarity. Interviews with business owners of Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, proceed to offer insights on alternative, normative dimensions that may help explain different levels of trust found amongst citizens. To measure the quantitative extent of trust and particular factors influential for its formation, “trust games” were deployed in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The experiments were engineered to test areas of common knowledge, specifically ethnicity and the “social virtue” of integrity. Engaging with common knowledge variables in this way offered for analysis areas of mutual understanding between citizens. Alongside confirming higher levels of trust in Tanzania than in Kenya, the games revealed how common knowledge of ethnicity and integrity bore influential effects on levels of trust that were country-specific. Whilst common knowledge of ethnicity tended to have a negative impact on levels of cooperation in Tanzania as compared to Kenya, the effect was the opposite for the social virtue of integrity. The thesis’ central argument is that congruence between citizens on what marks out a trustworthy person is a precondition for relationships of trust to emerge; some symmetry in the moral discourse surrounding agency, character and reputation is thus critical for bringing about the economic and political benefits associated with social capital.

This thesis consists of four separate chapters which address different aspects of inequality and income determination. The first three chapters are country-level studies which examine (1) how incomes are shaped by spatial price differences, (2) the factor income composition, and (3) enterprise size. The final chapter analyses how income inequality changed at the global level. The first chapter investigates the implications of regional price differences for earnings differentials and inequality in Germany. I combine a district-level price index with administrative earnings data from social security records. Prices have a strong equalising effect on district average wages in West Germany, but a weaker effect in East Germany and at the national level. The change in overall inequality as a result of regional price differences is small (although significant in many cases), because inequality is mostly explained by differences within rather than between districts. The second chapter is motivated by the rapid increase in top income shares in the United States since the 1980s. Using data derived from tax filings, I show that this pattern is very similar after controlling for changes in tax unit size. Over the same period as top income shares increased, the composition of these incomes changed dramatically, with the labour share rising. Using a non-parametric copula framework, I show that incomes from labour and capital have become more closely associated at the top. This association is asymmetric such that top wage earners are more likely to also receive high capital incomes, compared with top capital income recipients receiving high wages. In the third chapter, I investigate the positive cross-sectional relationship between enterprise size and earnings using panel data from Ghana. I find evidence for a significant firm size effect in matched firm-worker data and a labour force panel, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. The size effect in self-employment is stronger in the cross-section, but it is driven by individual time-invariant characteristics. The final chapter studies the global interpersonal income distribution using a newly constructed and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. The chapter finds that the global Gini remains high and approximately unchanged at around 0.7. However, this hides a substantial change in the global distribution from a twin-peaked distribution in 1988 into a single-peaked one now. Furthermore, the regional composition of the global distribution changed, as China graduated from the bottom ranks. As a result of the growth in Asia, the poorest quantiles of the global distribution are now largely from Sub-Saharan Africa. By exploiting the panel dimension of the dataset, the analysis shows which decile-groups within countries have benefitted most over this 20-year period. In addition, the chapter presents a preliminary assessment of how estimates of global inequality are affected by the likely underreporting of top incomes in surveys.

Online reputation systems are certainly the most overlooked 'heroes' of today's social Web. While these mechanisms are a vital element of every online transaction, they have received less consideration than some of their more well-known cousins, such as recommender systems or social networks, whose success would often not have been possible and tenable without their discrete but active backing. It then follows that despite their value and importance, the implementation of current reputation mechanisms has mostly been the result of trial-and-error. Resting on an economic perspective, this thesis regroups three chapters whose frameworks and findings aim at helping mechanism designers and researchers understand key mechanisms at play and develop more efficient online reputation systems. The first chapter examines the optimal number of ratings a reputation mechanism must make publicly available within an online marketplace in order to minimize cheating and maximize Pareto efficiency. I develop a moral hazard stage game featuring fictitious players which has the compelling property to prevent reputation effects from disappearing in the long run. I show that the number of ratings displayed by a reputation system is a fundamental predictor of market efficiency, and that the latter number should be kept minimal in order to maximize social welfare in the market – especially for economies proposing interactions with a high profit margin. The second chapter studies how different classes of reporting behaviours commonly found online affect the reliability of a reputation mechanism. I develop an iterative stochastic approximation model which I use to construct a behavioural measure of efficiency, so-called 'reporting bias'. I demonstrate that reporting bias tends towards its maximum when raters comply with the reports left by their predecessors. Following this result, I recommend to keep the rating interface separated from the rest of the reputation system. I also find that fake ratings are particularly harmful when one type of behaviour is present in the economy and suggest to counterbalance sybil attacks by displaying pairs of contrasted ratings. Finally, I defend the use of the arithmetic mean against the median as a way to compute reputation scores. The third chapter analyses how 5-star rating scales can lead to the formation of bimodal distributions of ratings within online marketplaces. Using a 2-time period model featuring altruistic raters, I identify the existence of a 'blind spot' of unrated transactions whose magnitude increases in the cost of rating and decreases in the number of buyers inhabiting the economy. Developing an additional model featuring Bayesian agents suffering from confirmatory bias, I show that non-binary rating scales can leave space to ambiguity and possibly wrong posteriors, even in the long run. Overall, results of the chapter hint that fine-grained rating scales best suit signalling reputation systems while coarse-grained scales should be preferred for sanctioning mechanisms.

In this thesis we study decentralized dynamics for non-cooperative and cooperative games. The dynamics are behaviorally motivated and assume that very little information is available about other players' preferences, actions, or payoffs. For example, this is the case in markets where exchanges are frequent and the sheer size of the market hinders participants from learning about others' preferences. We consider learning dynamics that are based on trial-and-error and aspiration-based heuristics. Players occasionally try to increase their performance given their current payoffs. If successful they stick to the new action, otherwise they revert to their old action. We also study a dynamic model of social influence based on findings in sociology and psychology that people have a propensity to conform to others' behavior irrespective of the payoff consequences. We analyze the dynamics with a particular focus on two questions: How long does it take to reach equilibrium and what are the stability and welfare properties of the equilibria that the process selects? These questions are at the core of understanding which equilibrium concepts are robust in environments where players have little information about the game and the high rationality assumptions of standard game theory are not very realistic. Methodologically, this thesis builds on game theoretic techniques and prominent solution concepts such as the Nash equilibrium for non-cooperative games and the core for cooperative games, as well as refinement concepts like stochastic stability. The proofs rely on mathematical techniques from random walk theory and integer programming.

This thesis takes three different perspectives, using theoretical and experimental techniques, on time-inconsistent preferences and how the existence of multiple selves can affect both consumer behaviour and policy design. Across domains such as retirement saving, health, and educational achievement, intertemporal choice presents a challenge for both individuals and policymakers. The first paper, 'Choosing When to Nudge: Designing Behavioural Policy around Decision-Making Costs,' considers how behavioural policy, which has proven increasingly popular with policymakers, affects welfare. I find that for present-biased consumers, behavioural policies help some consumers but can inefficiently discourage others from optimizing. Such policies therefore have an ambiguous effect on welfare, and similar to traditional policies, can impose equity-efficiency tradeoffs. Monopolies may increase welfare given their incentive to simplify consumer decisions instead of exploit switching costs. The second paper, 'Virtue and Vice with Endogenous Preferences,' considers behaviour when preferences are affected by consumer decisions. I introduce agents whose temptation to consume in the present is affected by how much they choose to save for the future. I find that differences between agents can trap them in divergent paths of self-improvement -- saving more, they value the future more, making saving optimal -- or binging -- consuming more makes them indifferent to future costs, making consumption optimal. At the extreme, it is frequently an optimum for a consumer to consume their entire wealth. The final paper, 'Bet You Can't Eat Just One: Consumption Complementarity and 'Self'-Control' considers an intrapersonal game between a moderate cold self and a hot self that wants to indulge. In equilibrium, sophisticated selves best respond to each other's behaviour: the cold self over-abstains and the hot self over-indulges to avoid inducing the other state. I test these ideas in the lab, and find that subjects on a diet who were induced to consume a piece of chocolate before the experiment indulge more in chocolate during the experiment, even when the initial indulgence was imposed by the experimenter. Eating a piece of chocolate, this suggests, can induce a period during which chocolate is more appealing.

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Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2015-10-26T14:52:50Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Cristina Maria dos Reis Martins_.pdf: 1918739 bytes, checksum: 87cf5f9bf676345b8b714e34dcab1462 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-10-26T14:52:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cristina Maria dos Reis Martins_.pdf: 1918739 bytes, checksum: 87cf5f9bf676345b8b714e34dcab1462 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-06-22 / Nenhuma / Este trabalho busca analisar as estratégias de uso do solo para atração de empresas inovadoras na Região do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, onde foram implantados os parques tecnológicos Tecnosinos, em São Leopoldo, e Feevale Techpark, que inclui as unidades Valetec, em Campo Bom e Hamburgtec, em Novo Hamburgo. Adotou-se como fundamento para a pesquisa um modelo teórico desenvolvido por Friedrich e Nam (2011, 2013), cujos principais argumentos são: o planejamento de uso do solo gera oportunidades e riscos para instalação de atividades industriais, e os parques tecnológicos são uma combinação entre a política de uso do solo e a política industrial, que contribuí para o aumento da competitividade dos municípios na atração de empresas inovadoras. O objetivo principal desse estudo é analisar as estratégias de uso do solo adotadas pelos municípios de São Leopoldo, Campo Bom e Novo Hamburgo, por meio de uma análise comparativa entre eles e seus parques tecnológicos. Especificamente busca-se: verificar o grau de especialização desses municípios nas atividades inovadoras e nas atividades tradicionais da região; a análise do planejamento de uso do solo dos municípios; e a análise das características dos parques tecnológicos Tecnosinos e Feevale Techpark. O trabalho foi realizado por meio de pesquisa documental e bibliográfica e levantamento de dados estatísticos, com análises qualitativas e descritivas. Para verificar o grau de especialização dos municípios foram calculados os quocientes de localização, conforme a metodologia de Isard (1956). Para investigar as estratégias de uso do solo adotadas pelos municípios foi realizada uma análise dos planos diretores municipais e do processo de constituição e desenvolvimento dos parques tecnológicos na região de estudo. Os resultados revelaram que a implantação dos parques tecnológicos na região, em parte, foi uma alternativa para ajuste na pauta industrial local, dado o desgaste no setor coureiro-calçadista. A implantação dos parques tecnológicos também, em certa medida, cria possibilidades de mudanças na estrutura econômica local e condições para manutenção do crescimento econômico, dos níveis de emprego e de renda na região. Na comparação entre os dois parques estudados, concluiu-se que mesmo evidenciada a competição entre os municípios para atração de empresas de tecnologia da informação, os parques possuem estruturas diferenciadas, que atenuam a concorrência entre eles. / This work seeks to analyze the land-use strategies to attract innovative companies in the region of the Sinos River Valley, where technology parks Tecnosinos were implanted in Sao Leopoldo, and Feevale Techpark, which includes Valetec units in Campo Bom and Hamburgtec in Novo Hamburgo. It was adopted as the foundation for the research a theoretical model developed by Friedrich and Nam (2011, 2013), whose main arguments are: land-use planning creates opportunities and risks for the installation of industrial activities, and technology parks are a combination between land-use policy and industrial policy, which contributes to increasing the competitiveness of cities in attracting innovative high-tech companies. The main objective of this study is to analyze the land-use strategies adopted by the municipalities of São Leopoldo, Campo Bom and Novo Hamburgo, through a comparative analysis between them and their technology parks. Specifically seeks to: assess the degree of specialization of these municipalities in innovative-activities and traditional-activities in the region; the analysis of land-use planning in the municipalities; and the analysis of the characteristics of technology parks and Tecnosinos Feevale Techpark. The work was carried out through documentary and bibliographic-research and collection of statistical data with qualitative and descriptive analyzes. To check the degree of specialization of the municipalities the location quotients were calculated according to the methodology Isard (1956). To investigate land use strategies adopted by municipalities was conducted an analysis of municipal master plans and the process of constitution and development of technology parks in the study region. The results revealed that the implementation of technology parks in the region, in part, was an alternative to setting the local industrial agenda, given the wear on the leather-footwear industry. The implementation of technology parks also, to some extent, creates possibilities for changes in the local economic structure and conditions for maintaining economic growth, levels of employment and income in the region. Comparing the two studied parks, it was concluded that even evidenced competition between the municipalities to attract information technology companies, the parks have different structures, which lessen competition between them.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T20:21:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 OROZIMBO JOSE DE MORAES.pdf: 2582857 bytes, checksum: f657236d27a978ef9c487407b1971f54 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-02-12 / The purpose of this work is to analyse the environmental economics instruments, based in microeconomics and according to the policy matrix of The World Bank. Follow the evolution of environmental policy instruments from the firsth wave of comand and control instruments, the second wave of market based instruments in the 1970s and 1980 and the third wave of information disclosure in recent years. The concepts of sustainable development, welfare economics and market failure are preliminarly viewed to the analysis of instruments for resource management and pollution controll, as standards, tradable permits, subsidies, environmental taxes over production and goods, systems of deposit-refund, and public participation / Este trabalho se propõe a analisar os instrumentos econômicos de política ambiental, com base na microeconomia e segundo a classificação da matriz política do Banco Mundial. A evolução dos instrumentos de política econômicos é acompanhada pelas fases iniciadas com os instrumentos de comando e controle; na segunda, são usados instrumentos baseados no mercado dos anos 1970 e 1980 e, na terceira fase, é apresentado os instrumentos promotores de informações dos anos mais recentes. Os conceitos de desenvolvimento sustentável, bem-estar e falha de mercado são abordados preliminarmente para a análise dos instrumentos voltados para a administração de recursos e para o controle da poluição, como padrões, permissões comerciáveis, subsídios, impostos e taxas sobre a produção e sobre produtos, sistemas de depósito-reembolso e engajamento do público

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T14:56:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 OROZIMBO JOSE DE MORAES.pdf: 2582857 bytes, checksum: f657236d27a978ef9c487407b1971f54 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-02-12 / The purpose of this work is to analyse the environmental economics instruments, based in microeconomics and according to the policy matrix of The World Bank. Follow the evolution of environmental policy instruments from the firsth wave of comand and control instruments, the second wave of market based instruments in the 1970s and 1980 and the third wave of information disclosure in recent years. The concepts of sustainable development, welfare economics and market failure are preliminarly viewed to the analysis of instruments for resource management and pollution controll, as standards, tradable permits, subsidies, environmental taxes over production and goods, systems of deposit-refund, and public participation / Este trabalho se propõe a analisar os instrumentos econômicos de política ambiental, com base na microeconomia e segundo a classificação da matriz política do Banco Mundial. A evolução dos instrumentos de política econômicos é acompanhada pelas fases iniciadas com os instrumentos de comando e controle; na segunda, são usados instrumentos baseados no mercado dos anos 1970 e 1980 e, na terceira fase, é apresentado os instrumentos promotores de informações dos anos mais recentes. Os conceitos de desenvolvimento sustentável, bem-estar e falha de mercado são abordados preliminarmente para a análise dos instrumentos voltados para a administração de recursos e para o controle da poluição, como padrões, permissões comerciáveis, subsídios, impostos e taxas sobre a produção e sobre produtos, sistemas de depósito-reembolso e engajamento do público