Thesis (doctoral) - Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-300).

abstract: Although many examples have demonstrated the great potential of a human crowd as an alternative supplier in creative problem-solving, empirical evidence shows that the performance of a crowd varies greatly even under similar situations. This phenomenon is defined as the performance variation puzzle in crowdsourcing. Cases suggest that crowd development influences crowd performance, but little research in crowdsourcing literature has examined the issue of crowd development. This dissertation studies how crowd development impacts crowd performance in crowdsourcing. It first develops a double-funnel framework on crowd development. Based on structural thinking and four crowd development examples, this conceptual framework elaborates different steps of crowd development in crowdsourcing. By doing so, this dissertation partitions a crowd development process into two sub-processes that map out two empirical studies. The first study examines the relationships between elements of event design and crowd emergence and the mechanisms underlying these relationships. This study takes a strong inference approach and tests whether tournament theory is more applicable than diffusion theory in explaining the relationships between elements of event design and crowd emergence in crowdsourcing. Results show that that neither diffusion theory nor tournament theory fully explains these relationships. This dissertation proposes a contatition (i.e., contagious competition) perspective that incorporates both elements of these two theories to get a full understanding of crowd emergence in crowdsourcing. The second empirical study draws from innovation search literature and tournament theory to address the performance variation puzzle through analyzing crowd attributes. Results show that neither innovation search perspective nor tournament theory fully explains the relationships between crowd attributes and crowd performance. Based on the research findings, this dissertation discovers a competition-search mechanism beneath the variation of crowd performance in crowdsourcing. This dissertation makes a few significant contributions. It maps out an emergent process for the first time in supply chain literature, discovers the mechanisms underlying the performance implication of a crowd-development process, and answers a research call on crowd engagement and utilization. Managerial implications for crowd management are also discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2017

Comparison of the aproach to the legal regulatory framework of competition in selected liberal schools of economic thought The thesis focuses on different approaches and conceptions of the market process, economic competition, anticompetitive practices and its regulatory framework in works of selected authors, who belong to different schools of economic thought, that are commonly labeled as "liberal". Gathered findings are then compared. Selected schools of economic thought are the Austrian school, the Chicago school and Freiburg or Ordoliberal school. Each section starts with analysis of the methodology used by given school of economic thought and explanation of concepts used, followed by the definition of market process and views on market order and arrangement and ending with suggestions on the form of actual regulation. First chapter of the thesis starts with defining basic concepts of economic competition, its regulation and anticompetitive practices. These concepts raise little difficulty or confusion thanks to their steady and common legislative usage. The second chapter explains the term "liberal" which is quite contrary to previous terms used ambiguously and often with completely opposite meanings. These two initial chapters delimit the scope and field of study of the thesis. The core of...

The aim of this project was to provide sound scientific underpinning for the development of new weed management strategies in sugar cane by exploring competition from the major weeds, and explaining the different mechanisms of weed interference from Paspalum paniculatum and P. urvillei. Critical periods of weed control (CPWC) were studied in six field trials. In ratoon cane, CPWC with natural weed infestations started between 228 and 916 growing degree days (GDD), and ended between 648 and 1311 GDD, depending on the site and cane variety. These results represented a maximum CPWC of 12 to 28 weeks after harvest (WAH). In plant cane, the CPWC started earlier (6 WAP) and was longer than those in ratoon cane. Relative competitiveness ‘q’ values of eight common weed species showed that sugar cane was a stronger competitor than most of the weeds tested. The adverse effect of weed competition in sugar cane is not experienced before several weeks following weed emergence. Weeds transplanted 10 WAP caused no significant change in cane yield response as compared to those transplanted 4 WAP. Paspalum paniculatum was often found to be more competitive than P. urvillei, although the latter produced more leaf area and grew taller to intercept more light within the canopy. This indicated that other mechanisms of weed interference were involved and competition for light was more important during the earlier (tillering) growth stages. Root competition was shown to be as important as shoot competition. Root competition effects were observed several weeks after imposing competition, suggesting that it was more important than competition for light in the post-tillering phase. Application of root exudates from the two grasses to sugar cane confirmed an allelopathic effect on the root biomass of sugar cane. One chemical identified in the leachates from both Paspalum species for the allelopathic effects was 2-propenoic acid, 3-(4-methoxyphenyl). The main implications of the above findings for the Mauritian sugar industry would involve a change in the timing of application of herbicides. A new tank-mix consisting of trifloxysulfuron + ametryn and amicarbazone has been found to meet this objective. This strategy will enable a saving of at least one herbicide treatment per season. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Plant Production and Soil Science / unrestricted

From Preface: As a teacher with experience in competitive sport, the author became interested in the topic of athletic competition when joining the staff of an all-boys' school. The competitive aspect of sport at such a school can make quite an impression on an inexperienced teacher. The question then arose; Is this competitive atmosphere universal? Is this type of competition acceptable and desirable in our schools? Being a teacher of Physical Education as well as other subjects and also being actively involved in the coaching of senior sports teams the author regarded himself suitably qualified to investigate the matter of athletic competition in our schools.

Competition among firms is a central feature in all free market economies such as South Africa. One of the biggest threats to competition is the presence of cartels in markets. Cartels are firms which collude and compete unfairly in order to obtain monopoly-like profits. For more than fifty years South Africa’s economic landscape has been dominated by a vast network of cartels invital industries, such as bread, cement and fertiliser. South Africa promulgated the Competition Act 89 of 1998 to eradicate cartels and promote and maintain competition within the South African economy. The Competition Act 89 of 1998 prohibits cartel activity and provides for a fine of 10% of turn over for firms found to have engaged in cartel activity. For a variety of reasons, these administrative fines have failed to deter firms from commencing and/or continuing to engage in cartel activity. This is evidenced by the increasing number of firms engaged in large -scale cartels in essential industries, such as construction and food. Public outcry and global trends have persuaded legislators to enactment more stringent penalties in the Competition Amendment Act 1 of 2009. Section 12 of the Competition Amendment Act , which inserts section 73A, creates a cartel of fence in terms of which a director who causes his firm to engage in cartel activity faces ten year imprisonment or a fine of R500, 000. This research shall critically analyse the Competition Amendment Acts effect on deterring cartel activity in South Africa. Despite the legislators’ aim to provide a bigger deterrent for engaging in cartel activity, section 73A of the Competition Amendment Act arouses scrutiny. Firstly, the promulgation of the new cartel offence is contrary to the decimalisation trend in South African company law which recognises the difficulty in enforcing complex regulatory offences with criminal provisions. Secondly, Section 73(5)A appears to infringe an accused director's right to be presumed innocent. Lastly there are co-ordination issues between the National Prosecuting Authority and the Corporate Leniency Policy relating to the granting of prose cutorial immunity for firms which cooperate with the Competition Commission. There search will out line these problems in full. With regards to the problems caused by section 73A, the research will use a comparative analysis with the positionin the United States. Of all the jurisdictions which criminalise cartel activity, the United States was one of the earliest and the most prolific insecuring convictions for directors who cause their firms to engage in cartel activity. The United States has taken innovative steps to supplement their public cartel enforcement drive such as the prosecution of international cartels and the use of private actions. In this regard, the research will extrapolate favourable cartel enforcement measures from the United States for recommendation in order to assist with South Africa’s cartel enforcement and alleviate the problems caused by section 73A, outlined above.

Chapter 1: Downstream Competition and the Effects of Buyer Power The first chapter examines the interaction between buyer power and competition intensity in the downstream market in affecting consumer and total welfare. We study a model where oligopolistic retailers compete in quantity in the downstream market and one of them is a large retailer that has its own exclusive supplier. Negotiation between this retailer and its supplier is modeled as a generalized Nash bargaining game. We demonstrate that an increase in the buyer power of the large retailer against its supplier leads to a fall in retail price and consequently an improvement in consumer surplus and this is true even in the extreme case where the downstream market is served by a monopoly. More interestingly, we find that the effects of buyer power are large when the intensity of downstream competition is low, with the effects being the largest in the case of downstream monopoly. This suggests that buyer power and downstream competition are substitutes. Chapter 2: Subsidy, Product Diversity and Buyer Power The objective of the second chapter is to analyze the effectiveness of government subsidies in promoting product diversity when the downstream firm (a retailer) has buyer power. We extend the standard Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition and compare the effects of subsidies on equilibrium number of product varieties and social welfare in the case where products are sold directly to consumers and the case where they are sold through a monopoly retailer with buyer power. Two types of subsidies are considered, a subsidy on marginal cost and a subsidy on fixed cost. We find that while the two types of subsides have different effects on the quantity and retail price of each variety, they both raise the number of product varieties and the social welfare. Moreover, a combination of the two types of subsidies is able to achieve the social optimum. These results are true even when products are distributed through a downstream monopoly retailer who has all the bargaining power, but the mechanism through which a subsidy increases product varieties is different. In comparison with the case where products are distributed directly to consumers, retailer buyer power reduces product variety and social welfare. Furthermore subsidies become less effective in the presence of buyer power. To be more specific, retailer buyer power has both a level effect and a marginal effect on product diversity. At any given subsidy rate, the equilibrium number of varieties is smaller and a marginal increase in subsidy leads to a smaller increase in the number of varieties. Chapter 3: Subsidy on Complementary Products in a Model of Monopolistic Competition The third chapter seeks to re-examine the market provision of product diversity under monopolistic competition and the effects of an infinitesimal subsidy on product variety and social welfare in the case of complementary products. This examination builds on the standard Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition but assumes an alternative demand linkage. The results show that, different from the case of substitutable products, demand complementarity leads to multiple equilibriums and the number of product varieties could be higher or lower than the constrained optimum depending on the level of the fixed cost of production. When the fixed costs are small, the market yields too many products and an infinitesimal subsidy exacerbates the problem leading to an over-supply of product varieties. On the other hand, when the fixed costs are large, there are too few products and in some cases the complementary goods industry becomes non-existent. A subsidy that induces a switch of equilibriums enhances product variety and improves social welfare.

In the last three decades regional economic co-operation and integration attracted a great deal of interest in Southern Africa, as elsewhere in the Third World. Early attempts at regional integration in Southern Africa were generally characterised by poor and disappointing performance. Recent changes at both regional and international contexts suggest the need to rethink regional integration as part of an overall economic development strategy and as means to attain further political and security stability. This thesis examines the theory and practice of regional integration in developing countries during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Particular focus is directed at the theoretical and practical implications of different integration approaches for Southern Africa, as well as at the rationale for the revival of this development strategy in the 1990s. Integration schemes of various conceptual natures did not fulfil the expectations included either in the theoretical postulates or in the formal treaties. However, macroeconomic reforms centred in SAPs and their international development context as well as the post-apartheid regional context add new dimensions to regional co-operation and integration for development in the SAR. Among other things they imply a change in the emphasis from inward-looking to outward-looking integration strategies. By yielding the need for reconciling trade liberalisation and RECI this new dimension in integration poses a new challenge to both the contemporary integration approaches and the respective policy implications. Further research is required to determine the optimality of an "adjusted" integration approach, combining elements of the above perspectives.

Article 102 TFEU has been criticised in the past for being too formalistic and lacking in economic analysis. If these comments are true when considering traditional manufacturing industries, then these criticisms are of even more importance when dealing with the high technology markets for it is these markets the determine the future prosperity of Europe. High technology markets are characterised by rapid innovation, a reliance on intellectual property rights and are seen by many as being prone to market failure as a result off inefficient lock-in arising through the economic theory of network effects. As such it is questionable whether traditional means of applying European competition law are suitable in their application to the high technology markets. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Apple and Intel have found themselves in the European Commission's crosshairs. More recently the European Parliament has voted in favour of breaking up Google in response to its alleged anticompetitive conduct. The case against Microsoft and more recently the Commission's investigation into Google provide an ideal starting point upon which to judge whether European competition law, as it is currently interpreted, is suited to deal with the high technology markets. Have the authorities' decisions made any real impact on the way the market operates? Have consumers benefited from their decisions? If the answers to these questions are no, it raises the further questions: what other tools are available when attempting to deal with competition issues within the high technology sectors? The technology sectors present competition law with a unique set of challenges and, with this in mind, the authorities may need to be careful when applying principles that were originally applied to markets that exhibited more 'traditional' economic characteristics.

La thèse est une collection de cinq articles académiques, chacun apportant une contribution originale à la connaissance et à la recherche scientifique dans le domaine de l’économie de l’imposition du capital et des sociétés. Les travaux empiriques de Gaëtan Nicodème se situent dans le contexte de la concurrence fiscale en Europe. Le premier chapitre ‘Corporate Tax Competition and Coordination in the European Union: What do we know? Where do we stand? (Publié dans International Taxation Handbook) revisite la problématique de la concurrence fiscale dans l’Union Européenne, discute la littérature économique théorique et empirique sur la question et analyse les réponses politiques qui y sont apportées. Après avoir remis la problématique dans son contexte institutionnel, l’auteur compare les résultats provenant de la littérature avec les caractéristiques propres à l’Union Européenne, notamment en termes de l’étendue et des conséquences de la concurrence fiscale. Il passe ensuite en revue les questions théoriques et de mise en œuvre pratique que soulèvent une possible harmonisation et consolidation des bases fiscales de l’impôt des sociétés en Europe. Tout en gardant à l’esprit la diversité des solutions qui existent dans la mise en œuvre, il montre que l’harmonisation des bases fiscales est à même de générer des gains économiques. Le deuxième chapitre ‘Comparing Effective Corporate Tax Rates’ (à paraître dans Frontiers in Finance and Economics) passe en revue les méthodes de calcul de taux effectifs de l’impôt des sociétés. Le mérite de la contribution est non seulement d’offrir une typologie des ces taux mais également de montrer que leurs résultats sont très différents selon la méthode utilisée, que ce soit en niveau ou en classement des pays. L’auteur calcule également ces taux pour un échantillon de pays Européens avec une désagrégation sectorielle. Le troisième chapitre ‘Do Large Companies have Lower Effective Corporate Tax rates ? A European Survey’ utilise ces méthodes pour étudier s’il existe un lien entre les taux effectifs et la taille des entreprises. Utilisant de multiples méthodes d’estimation, l’auteur trouve un lien robuste et négatif entre le nombre d’employés et le taux effectif d’imposition des entreprises. Le quatrième chapitre ‘Foreign Ownership and Corporate Income Taxation : an Empirical Evaluation’ (co-auteur H. Huizinga et publié dans European Economic Review) constitue la première évaluation empirique pour l’Europe des théories d’exportation fiscale. Lorsque la mobilité du capital est imparfaite et que celui-ci est détenu par des actionnaires étrangers, les Etats ont un incitant à hausser la fiscalité pour exporter la charge fiscale sur ces actionnaires. L’étude empirique trouve une relation positive robuste entre le degré d’actionnariat étranger et la charge fiscale moyenne, validant ces théories. Le cinquième et dernier chapitre ‘Are International Deposits Tax Driven ? (Co-auteur H. Huizinga et publié dans Journal of Public Economics) analyse l’impact de l’imposition de l’épargne et de la fortune ainsi que de l’échange d’informations fiscales sur les dépôts bancaires internationaux. Utilisant des données bilatérales confidentielles de la BRI, l’étude montre que ces variables fiscales ont un impact sur ces dépôts, suggérant qu’ils sont en partie effectués pour éluder l’impôt.