Thesis (M.Ing. (Development and Management Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Thesis (M.Ing. (Development and Management Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

The overarching research objective is to address the tightly-coupled interactions between the demand-side and supply-side components of the United States Commercial Air Transportation System (CATS) in a time-variant environment. A system-of-system perspective is adopted, where the scope is extended beyond the National Airspace System (NAS) level to the National Transportation System (NTS) level to capture the intermodal and multimodal relationships between NTS stakeholders. The Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation technique is employed where the NTS/NAS is treated as an integrated Multi-Agent System comprising of consumer and service provider agents representing the demand-side and supply-side components respectively. Successful calibration and validation of both model components against the observable real world data provided a CATS simulation tool where the aviation demand is estimated from socioeconomic and demographic properties of the population instead of merely based on enplanement growth multipliers. This valuable achievement enabled a 20-year outlook simulation study to investigate the implications of a global fuel price hike on the airline industry and the U.S. CATS at large. Simulation outcomes revealed insights into the airline competitive behaviors and the subsequent responses from transportation consumers.

This thesis consists of four essays, mainly related to the fields of industrial organization and political economy. The focus is on deregulation of electricity retail markets and on the continued regulation of parts of such markets after the introduction of competition. The first essay is an empirical essay on the causes of deregulation. The timing of implementation of competition in retail electricity markets in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand is studied. One conclusion is that there exist important qualitative differences between the United States and Europe. While deregulation in the United States to a large extent seems to have been driven by consumer interest concerns, the influence from interest groups is more pronounced in Europe.The second (theoretical) and third (empirical) essays deal with the interaction between the regulation of distribution networks and the retail market. When the regulated and unregulated operations are conducted within vertically integrated companies the regulation may not only have an effect on the regulated market, but also affect the behavior in the unregulated market. In the third essay a test that uses prices to detect patterns of cross-subsidization is developed and used on Norwegian data. Especially the effects of a regulatory change on cross-subsidization behavior are analyzed. The results both highlight the importance of a well-designed regulation of the regulated market and give support to requirements of vertical separation between regulated and unregulated operations.The fourth essay is a study of domestic electricity demand. It is thus somewhat different than the other papers since it is not directly connected to the issue of electricity market deregulation. Since the energy sector is an essential part of any modern economy and energy production has considerable environmental effects, the sector has for a long time been subject to political interventions. To some extent the policy instruments available to the legislator are reduced by deregulations. The use of taxes to affect prices and thus the demand for electricity may at the same time become an even more important policy instrument and more difficult to implement due to the internationalization of the electricity market. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2003

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This thesis is motivated by the impacts of contemporary political and economic issues such as microeconomic reform and regulatory control on the Australian wheat industry. Firstly, the suggestion of whether the AWB (International) Ltd commands market power and secondly, that the objectives of the AWB Ltd have changed since semi-privatisation of the Australian Wheat Board under the Wheat Marketing Act, 1989. The AWB (International) Ltd’s ability to price discriminate is a key component to the retention of the single desk regulatory arrangement for the export of Australian wheat. Due to data restrictions the market power of the AWB (International) Ltd has not been determined within this thesis. To complement this traditional approach, a more novel proposal is developed to determine the effect of microeconomic reform on the Australian wheat industry. Conceptualising the change of the AWB Ltd’s objectives as a shift from revenue maximization to profit maximization, this study examines the impact of such a change on the pricing policies of a multi- market price-setting firm. More specifically, this study investigates, for two hypothetical objective functions, a risk averse firm’s price-setting behaviour in an “overseas” and a “domestic” market, given differing costs of supply, uncertain demand functions and differing price elasticities of demand in each market. The aim is to generate empirically testable hypotheses relating to the impact of a change of objectives on pricing behaviour.