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We explore existing political commitments by states regarding the development and use of lethal autonomous weapon systems. We carry out two background reviewing efforts, the first addressing ethical and legal framings and proposals from recent academic literature, the second addressing recent formal policy principles as endorsed by states, with a focus on the principles adopted by the United States Department of Defense and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We then develop two conceptual case studies. The first addresses the interrelated principles of explainability and traceability, leading to proposals for acceptable scope limitations to these principles. The second considers the topic of deception in warfare and how it may be viewed in the context of ethical principles for lethal autonomous weapon systems.

This report contains three separate papers, each addressing selected issues concerning natural gas policy and security of gas supply in Europe. The over-arching themes are vulnerability (to supply disruptions, to supplier pricing power) and fragmentation; and measures designed to overcome them, namely interconnection and consolidation of bargaining power. The first paper contains a review of some of the economic effects of, and subsequent policy reactions to, the January 2009 cut of Russian gas supplies through the Ukraine Corridor, with a particular focus on Bulgaria and on EU policy. The second paper provides an analysis of the current state of gas relations between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, with a focus on the Ukrainian perspective and on recent political developments in that country. The third paper provides an analysis of the case for consolidating buyer power in line with the concept of an EU Gas Purchasing Agency.

China is a rising global power with a growing role and impact on the world's energy markets as well as on the Earth's climate system. China pursues its development in an essentially non-confrontational manner, a vision encapsulated by the notion of peaceful rise which is viewed positively in the world's major capitals. Nevertheless, China's rapid growth represents a genuine global challenge and raises many questions. How is China dealing with its growing need for imported crude oil? What is the impact of China's rise on the global oil market, notably in terms of oil price developments? Are Chinese actions on oil markets different from those of other major importers? What opportunities and risks arise as a result of china's growing role on the global oil market from the viewpoint of other global players? In this report we seek to offer some answers to those questions with a review of China's developing energy policy, of the actions and revealed preferences of its national oil companies, and of broader economic and geopolitical analyses of the impact of China's growing oil consumption on other global players.

The dissertation is dedicated to two interconnected questions. First, I try to understand how consumers choose from a set of complex pricing schemes. I design two lab experiments that generate rich datasets allowing to address the question of interest. The most interesting result comes from the second experiment, where in the set of pricing schemes offered to subjects, one pricing scheme has a convex cost function at the possible demand range, while all other pricing schemes have linear cost functions at this range. I document a bias towards the pricing scheme associated with a convex cost function. The second question is to understand how the observed consumer behavior affects pricing decisions of profit-maximizing firms. I address this question by constructing a model where a monopolist can price discriminate against consumers with different willingness to pay and the same limited ability to compare market alternatives. In this model, it might be profitable for the monopolist to include dominated offers (i.e. such offers that are never chosen by rational consumers who can compare all available offers) in the menu of pricing schemes. The main result is the necessary condition for this pricing strategy to be profitable: consumers with a higher willingness to pay should be more likely to have...