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In 1994, the use of wind turbines for electricity generation verges on economic respectability. Two contradictory trends have prepared a fertile niche for utility-scale windpower. The introduction of "deregulatory," competitive principles onto the electric industry fostered a non-utility generating sector relying on unconventional technologies. Simultaneously, policy-makers using "hyper-regulatory" tactics to pursue social goals such as reduced pollution pushed utilities to include renewable energy in their resource plans. Both tendencies advanced windpower. By comparing the Federal Wind Energy Program (FWEP) to California's entrepreneurial windpower industry, this dissertation argues that windpower constituted a conservative addition to the American electric utility system, rather than a radical challenge to it. True, venture capitalists producing and delivering windpower to the nation's transmission grid challenged the utilities' financial control. But participants in the windpower story have constructed a version of windpower largely compatible with the electric system. The most notable products of the FWEP--multi-megawatt wind generators--proved too complex, too expensive and too unreliable for their environment. Windpower entrepreneurs, by contrast, devised smaller machines better suited to the market. Equally important, regulatory support shielded the windfarms from the political and economic turnabouts that scuttled the ambitious FWEP, which relied completely on ephemeral Federal patronage. Today's wind entrepreneurs present their technology as a cost-effective addition to the conventional generating system, rather than as a social tool dependent on government support for environmentalism. But the story of windpower does not constitute a self-contained drama. In addition to pitched negotiations over wind energy, the story implicates the changing utility industry, shifts in global energy politics, and emergent environmentalism. The windfarms' "success" and the FWEP's "failure" frequently depended on actors' ability to exploit or insulate themselves from events unrelated to windpower itself. Thus, the dissertation binds firstperson accounts from participants in the windpower story to strands of larger histories, recounted through periodical and secondary literature. The dissertation speaks to historians, sociologists, energy managers, policy-makers and members of the community of "science and technology studies." Ultimately, it aims to produce a tool for the actors and policymakers it describes. ; Ph. D.

We consider an agent who invests in a stock and a money market in order to maximize the asymptotic behaviour of expected utility of the portfolio market price in the presence of proportional transaction costs. The assumption that the portfolio market price is a geometric Brownian motion and the restriction to utility function with hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) enable us to evaluate interval investment strategies. It is shown that the optimal interval strategy is also optimal among a wide family of strategies and that it is optimal also in a time changed model in case of logarithmic utility.

AbstractIn this paper we prove that the symmetric Nash solution is a risk neutral von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function on the class of pure bargaining games. Our result corrects an error in Roth (Econometrica 46:587–594, 983, 1978) and generalizes Roth's result to bargaining games with arbitrary status quo.

The sustainable development goal for water and sanitation to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all is a lofty goal. Worldwide, 2.4 billion people remain without access to improved sanitation and nearly 0.7 billion remain without access to improved drinking water sources. Those who have access to water supply and sanitation (WSS) services often must cope with intermittent water supply, sewerage system overflows, and poor customer service. Poor service frequently stems from a vicious cycle of dysfunctional political environments and inefficient practices. Global forces - including climate change, water scarcity, population growth, and rapid urbanization - exacerbate these challenges in providing high-quality, sustainable WSS service delivery. Therefore, WSS utilities require a new approach to planning and sequencing reforms to provide WSS services in a sustainable manner. The utility of the future (UoF) program provides this new approach and was designed in a way that builds on the extensive body of knowledge on utility performance improvement. Chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two defines the UoF concept, the determinants of success, and the analytical basis of the program. Chapter three presents the methodology developed specifically to conduct the diagnostic assessment and determine the utility's desired maturity level. Chapter four presents a 15-step approach to translating the results of the diagnostic assessment into a prioritized and sequenced action plan.

This article argues that Marshall's theory of market choice was originally elaborated within the classic framework of the use value/exchangeable value dichotomy, with reference to a version of utilitarianism that did not assume measurable utility. The key concepts were those of marginal transaction and consumer surplus or rent, both of which were expressed exclusively in terms of money transfers. Later on, Marshall moved toward an explicitly utilitarian framework by emphasizing the marginal utility of money, possibly because he had stumbled on the problem of the determinateness of marginal demand prices. The article shows that, by moving in this direction, Marshall committed himself to a standpoint that undermined the generality of his approach to consumer behavior and obscured his promising ideas concerning interpersonal comparisons of welfare. It is also argued that this move was actually unnecessary, as the early framework could have enabled Marshall to deal with the problem of determinateness in less restrictive terms.

We examine the theoretical interrelations between progressive income taxation and macroeconomic (in)stability in an otherwise standard one-sector AK model of endogenous growth with utility-generating government purchases of goods and services. In sharp contrast to traditional Keynesian-type stabilization policies, progressive taxation operates like an automatic destabilizer that generates equilibrium indeterminacy and belief-driven fluctuations in our endogenously growing macroeconomy. Unlike the no-sustained-growth counterpart, this instability result is obtained regardless of (i) the degree of the public-spending preference externality and (ii) whether private and public consumption expenditures are substitutes, complements or additively separable in the household's utility function.

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd We examine the theoretical interrelations between progressive income taxation and macroeconomic (in)stability in an otherwise standard one-sector AK model of endogenous growth with utility-generating government purchases of goods and services. In sharp contrast to traditional Keynesian-type stabilization policies, progressive taxation operates like an automatic destabilizer that generates equilibrium indeterminacy and belief-driven fluctuations in our endogenously growing macroeconomy. Unlike the no-sustained-growth counterpart, this instability result is obtained regardless of (i) the degree of the public-spending preference externality and (ii) whether private and public consumption expenditures are substitutes, complements or additively separable in the household's utility function.

AbstractThe article formalizes a seminal suggestion of Sloane (), studying a sports league in which club objectives are multi‐argument utility functions defined over profits, win percentages and fan (=supporter) welfare, thus combining the three objectives that have been addressed separately in previous models. Particular focus is on the consequences of increasing the utility weight on fan welfare, to capture the recent increasing supporter involvement in club governance in UK football. Positive consequences are unambiguously higher attendances, with more nuanced affects on ticket prices and player expenditure. A normative consequence is that positive profits for club owners indicate social sub‐optimality.