Search results for "imperfection"
showing 8 items of 8 documents
More firms, more competition? The case of the fourth operator in France's mobile phone market
2010
Accepted, Forthcoming; International audience; To foster competition the French government authorized a fourth operator, ‘Free', to enter the country's mobile phone market at the end of 2009 alongside Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom (BT), who held respectively one-half, one-third and one-sixth of the market. By using a stylized model of France's phone market, we have examined what we call the regulator's nightmares and dreams. If Cournot competition is in place before Free's entry, minimizing the total profit fails to maximize the consumer surplus and the total surplus; the maximum most realistic price fall is 6.7% compared to three-way competition and could be 1.7% only; if Orange, SFR an…
Product and Labour Market Regulations, Production Prices, Wages and Productivity
2016
ACLN; International audience; This study is an attempt to evaluate the effects of product and labour market regulations on industry productivity through their various impacts on changes in production prices and wages. In a first stage, the estimation of a regression equation on an industry*country panel, with controls for country*industry and country*year fixed effects, show that multi-factor productivity is negatively and significantly influenced by both indicators of industrial prices from same industry and weighted average of industrial prices from other industries, and by indicators of country wages weighted by industry labour shares for low and high skilled workers. In a second stage, …
Is the French mobile phone cartel really a cartel?
2009
International audience; France Telecom (FT), SFR and Bouygues Telecom (BT) have been fined by France's Conseil de la Concurrence (CC) for organizing a mobile phone cartel with stable market shares (one-half, one-third and one-sixth, respectively) and for directly exchanging commercial information. While not contesting the legal decision, it is argued here that the economic reasoning is flawed. (1) As the CC made much of the firms' stable market shares, we have first followed this line of reasoning by considering that the market shares are quotas under uniform costs. Even if there is a general incentive to form a monopolistic cartel, BT was too small for it to be worth its while to join it; it i…
Credit market failures and policy
2009
In a simple model of the credit market, based on Stiglitz-Weiss (1981), equilibria are computed and optimal policies to correct market failures are characterized. Some widely applied policies, notably interest-rate subsidies and investment subsidies, are compared to theoretical optimum, and an alternative optimal policy is described which we argue is more robust to model misspecification. An insight on the trade-off between credit policy and infrastructural investment is also offered. A discussion of some aspects of regional policy in Italy's Mezzogiorno is finally presented as an application of the analysis.
Robustness of Empirical Vibration Correlation Techniques for Predicting the Instability of Unstiffened Cylindrical Composite Shells in Axial Compress…
2020
Thin-walled carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) shells are increasingly used in aerospace industry. Such shells are prone to the loss of stability under compressive loads. Furthermore, the instability onset of monocoque shells exhibits a pronounced imperfection sensitivity. The vibration correlation technique (VCT) is being developed as a nondestructive test method for evaluation of the buckling load of the shells. In this study, accuracy and robustness of an existing and a modified VCT method are evaluated. With this aim, more than 20 thin-walled unstiffened CFRP shells have been produced and tested. The results obtained suggest that the vibration response under loads exceeding 0.25 of …
The Hu-Washizu variational principle for the identification of imperfections in beams
2008
This paper presents a procedure for the identification of imperfections of structural parameters based on displacement measurements by static tests. The proposed procedure is based on the well-known Hu–Washizu variational principle, suitably modified to account for the response measurements, which is able to provide closed-form solutions to some inverse problems for the identification of structural parameter imperfections in beams. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Imperfections et hybridation générique dans « Les Employés » d’Honoré de Balzac
2020
L’imperfezione dell’essere umano e delle sue costruzioni sociali è al centro della Comédie humaine. Il presente articolo intende esplorare questo aspetto della produzione letteraria di Balzac attraverso l’analisi de Les Employés (1845), in cui la mediocrità del mondo burocratico viene esaminata in dettaglio. Nel romanzo, la mediocrità vince sul merito, ma la rappresentazione dell’imperfezione trascende la dimensione puramente narrativa: Les Employés è un grande laboratorio in cui l’ibridazione tra genere romanzesco e genere teatrale interroga i limiti della creazione letteraria. The imperfection of the human being and his social constructions is at the heart of the Comédie humaine. This art…