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This research investigates the impact of both horizontal and vertical competition, on the one hand, and strategy types (commitment-based versus contingent-based equilibrium strategies), on the other hand, on the pollution accumulated by two supply chains over time. We consider a two-stage game model where two manufacturers and two retailers are involved in a wholesale price contract, in order to supply the demand over a finite time horizon. In the first stage of the game, the manufacturers set their respective optimal transfer prices. During the second stage, polluting emissions are created over time in proportion with demand, which is controlled by the retailers’ respective consumer prices. In this stage, the manufacturers are involved in emissions abatement. In this setup, we seek to identify the combination of market structure and strategy type that leads the two supply chains to generate the lowest pollution intensity and the highest level of abatement intensity.

We investigate how the relationship between economic growth and pollution is affected by the source of pollution: production or consumption. We are interested in polluting waste that cannot be naturally absorbed, but for which recycling efforts aim to avoid massive pollution accumulation with harmful consequences in the long run. We distinguish the cases where recycling efforts are capital-improving or capital-neutral. Based on both environmental and social welfare perspectives, we determine how the interaction between growth and polluting waste accumulation is affected by the source of pollution, i.e., either consumption or production, and by the fact that recycling may or may not act as an income generator, i.e., either capital-improving or capital-neutral recycling efforts. Several new results are extracted regarding optimal recycling policy and the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Beside the latter concern, we show both analytically and numerically that the optimal control of waste through recycling allows to reaching larger (resp., lower) consumption and capital stock levels under consumption-based waste compared to production-based waste while the latter permits to reach lower stocks of waste through lower recycling efforts.

This paper reports the results from a real-effort team production experiment, where best performers can impose either tacit or explicit sanctions on their less-performing partners. The behavior of the best performer in the team differs from one condition to another. When explicit sanctions are not allowed, good performers reduce their effort in response to the advantageous difference in scores; when they can impose sanctions, their change in effort is no longer related to the difference in scores. To some extent, a mechanism of explicit sanctions allows good performers to focus on their own performance. Not sanctioning an opponent who under-performs, what we refer to as forgiveness, prompts the latter to improve his performance, but applying the sanction has a stronger effect., L'article propose une étude expérimentale appliquée au problème du travail d'équipe. La tache consiste à compter le nombre d'occurrences du chiffre 7 dans des blocs de chiffre. Les équipes sont composées de deux joueurs. A chaque tour, le joueur qui fait le meilleur score peut appliquer une sanction à l'autre. Nous étudions les stratégies et les comportements des deux joueurs, dans une interaction qui dure quatre tours.

This paper analyzes how faculty members dynamically allocate their efforts between improving their research and teaching skills, taking into account the organizational structures and incentives implemented by academic institutions. The model builds on the assumption that organizational structures have an impact on the nature of spillover effects between teaching and research competencies. We analyze the dynamic equilibrium under unilateral and bilateral spillovers, using the no-spillover case as a benchmark. The bilateral spillover case is the most appealing as it achieves the highest overall performance; however, the nature of the equilibrium and the career paths can be quite different depending on the parameters of the problem such as the obsolescence of competencies or the strength of the spillover effect. This finding provides interesting insights on what could be the most productive configuration of a higher education institution.

International audience; Dans cet article, nous proposons une solution au problème du contrôle optimal de la diffusion des produits par la qualité en contexte de concurrence monopolistique. Pour spécifier la dynamique des ventes instantanées, nous supposons que le prix est un signal fiable de qualité et que la demande exprime une préférence pour la qualité par rapport au prix. La résolution du programme dynamique par le principe du maximum de Pontryagin débouche sur des cas de figure différenciés. D'autre part, une validation empirique des hypothèses du modèle sur les ventes de terminaux téléphoniques nous permet d'améliorer très sensiblement le coefficient de détermination obtenu par le modèle de Bass. Enfin, une application numérique du problème du contrôle optimal de la diffusion par la qualité permet de mesurer le coût d'opportunité de la stratégie optimale de qualité par rapport à la stratégie observée.

We consider rough products produced by a factory. Each product coming from the plant has \(m\) vital elements and some elements can be damaged. To obtain a perfect product (i.e. all the constitutive \(m\) elements are safe) all the damaged elements are repaired and a test phase follows. The result of this two-steps procedure is random. We suppose that the number \(Z_k\) of non-damaged elements is a Markov chain valued in the set \(\{0,1,\ldots ,m\}\), where \(k\) is the number of applied repairing-test phases. We have a qualitative result which says that if the repair phase is efficient then \(P(Z_k=m)\) is close to \(1\). As for production of a large number \(n\) of products, the former result allows us to give conditions under which either the \(n\) elements or a fraction of these \(n\) elements are (is) safe after the application of \(k\) previous maintenance phases.