Without evaluating the costs it is impossible to establish the cost price, required to compare electricity production using nuclear power and rival technologies. Would it be preferable to build a gas-powered plant, a nuclear reactor or a wind farm? Which technology yields the lowest cost per KWh? Under what conditions – financial terms, regulatory framework, carbon pricing – will private investors see an adequate return on nuclear power? In terms of the general interest, how does taking account of the cost of decommissioning and storing waste affect the competitiveness of nuclear power? This paper answers these questions in three stages. We shall start by taking a close look at the various items of cost associated with nuclear power. We shall look at how sensitive they are to various factors (among others the discount rate and price of fuel) in order to understand the substantial variations they display.We shall then review changes in the cost dynamic. From a historical perspective nuclear technology has been characterized by rising costs and it seems most likely that this trend willcontinue, being largely related to concerns about safety. Finally we shall analyse the poor cost-competitiveness of nuclear power, which provides critics of this technology with a compelling argument.

Since the first wave of nuclear reactors in 1970 to the construction of Generation III+ reactors in Finland and France in 2005 and 2007 respectively, nuclear power seems to be doomed to a cost escalation curse. In this paper we reexamine this issue for the French nuclear power fleet. Using the construction costs from the Cour des Comptes report, that was publicly available in 2012, we found that previous studies overestimated the cost escalation. Although, it is undeniable that the scale-up ended up in more costly reactors, we found evidence of a learning curve within the same size and type of reactors. This result confirms that standardization is a good direction to look, in order to overcome the cost escalation curse.

Investments in Next Generation Access Networks (NGANs) ask for a new set of regulatory remedies. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing on three issues: the migration from the legacy copper network to the NGA infrastructure, and how wholesale pricing regulation might affect this process; the introduction of di§erenti- ated wholesale remedies according to geographical differences in NGAN deployment; the impact of co-investment decisions on market outcomes and their interplay with access regulation. Using the recent economic literature, arguments and possible guidelines are proposed, which might be useful to regulators and policy makers.

In this paper we propose a model which shows that the impact of copyright infringement on music artists depends on the type of revenue that they receive (royalties from record companies, profits for self-released artists, revenues from live concerts). We then test the hypotheses derived from the model on a dataset consisting of a survey of 710 artists representative of the whole population of French professional musicians. The results are consistent with our model in so far as: (i) those artists with a recording contract who do more live performances are more tolerant of piracy; and (ii) self-released artists are less tolerant of piracy, and that their attitude is therefore closer to that of record companies.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a key role in creating incentives for firms to develop a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy by disclosing publicly self-regulatory corporate efforts. Their informational behavior is heterogeneous: Some NGOs mostly disclose information on firms that do not behave responsibly (e.g., Greenpeace). Others are specialized in revealing firms that are socially or environmentally responsible (e.g., the Marine Stewardship Council). We develop a model describing the interactions between a NGO, a continuum of firms and a representative stakeholder to explain what drives the NGO communication choice and its impact on the level of self-regulation. We show that the NGO specializes in equilibrium: depending on the size of its budget, it either chooses to cheer the leaders or to boo the laggards. We extend the model to the case with multiple NGOs. We also introduce the possibility of NGO-corporate partnerships and derive policy implications.

To market a new network technology effectively, manufacturers need to understand the structure and size of network effects associated with the product.If consumers’ surplus from adoption depends positively on the number of interconnections in the network, early adopters may need to be subsidized until a critical mass is reached. Moreover, in a two-sided market where platforms and complementary contents are constrained to non-negative prices, subsidies can be provided both by platform manufacturers and by producers of complementary contents. The article presents a model to analyse adoption dynamics with different subsidies and different stand-alone values for technology. The model shows that if the stand-alone value of technology is limited, subsidies from complementary contents producers may be pivotal to reach the critical mass. Moreover, under given conditions, this type of subsidies can lead to a more efficient adoption, increasing social welfare. In this case, assuming a monopolist platform manufacturer of the technology, complete contracts are needed to reach the Pareto optimal equilibrium.

The development of formal ICT standards is a loose form of collaborative innovation: Firms first develop rival technologies, some of which are then eventually selected in the standard. Against this background, firms often use informal consortia to define a clearer technology roadmap ahead of the formal standard setting process. The paper aims to assess how such consortia influence the volume of patents filed around standards, and whether this is efficient. We show that their effect actually depends on the strength of firms’ incentives to develop the standard. Consortium membership triggers a higher number of patent files when insufficient re wards for essential patents induce underinvestment in the standard. This effect is necessarily pro-efficient. In situations where excessive rewards induce patent races, consortium membership only moderately increases or even reduces their volume of patents. At least in the latter case, the effect of consortia membership is also pro-efficient.

We claim that a reason for why unregulated investor-owned local monopolies do not always charge the monopoly price is that they are threatened by customer complaints that may lead to retaliations from local elected officials. When investor-owned monopolies are exposed to this threat they will mimic the price(s) of their neighbour(s); the stronger the threat, the higher the spatial price correlation. The threat increases when elected officials have pro-consumer preferences and neighbours are geographically close. The empirical analysis, based on a complete cross-sectional data set from the Swedish district heating sector in 2007, confirms the theoretical predictions.