Manel Antelo

All fish for China

In this paper we examine the effect of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the level of fish intake in China in comparison with the rest of the world. We also analyse the origin and destination of China’s seafood products in order to understand the main patterns during the last decades. The results show that in the 1961–2011 period the rate of growth of the GDP in China doubled that of other developing regions, while the daily fish intake of China increased fourfold, making China the largest fish consumer in the world. Given the size and scale of China’s role in production, consumption, and global transformation of seafood markets, China is shaping a new era of industrialization in the history of the fishing industry.

Resilience and Challenges of Marine Social–Ecological Systems Under Complex and Interconnected Drivers

In this paper, we summarize the contributions made by an interdisciplinary group of researchers from different disciplines (biology, ecology, economics, and law) that deal with key dimensions of marine social–ecological systems. Particularly, the local and global seafood provision; the feasibility and management of marine protected areas; the use of marine ecosystem services; the institutional dimension in European fisheries, and the affordable models for providing scientific advice to small-scale fisheries. This Special Issue presents key findings from selected case studies around the world available to educators, policy makers, and the technical community. Together, these papers show that a range of diverse ecological, economic, social, and institutional components often mutually interact at spatial and temporal scales, which evidence that managing marine social–ecological systems needs a continuous adaptability to navigate into new governance systems.

Why are prices in wild catch and aquaculture industries so different

Through a comparative analysis of prices in capture fisheries and aquaculture sectors, the objectives of this paper are a) to investigate three the trends in prices of forage catches to feed the aquaculture species, b) to analyze the amount of fish species need to feed aquaculture species in order to assess the level of efficiency in resource use, and c) to examine the degree of economic concentration either in wild-catch industry and aquaculture sectors. The results show that prices of cultivated species are higher than prices of the same species when harvested from the sea. We explain this fact by the interplay of three forces. First, the amount of wild fish to feed aquaculture species continues to improve over time. Second, the pressure of fishing activities has not been reduced since catches of most forage fishes are declining, which induce higher prices of capture species that feed aquaculture production. Third, the level of seafood market concentration is significantly higher in aquaculture than in wild catches, which generates higher prices in aquaculture.

Licensing a non-drastic innovation under double informational asymmetry

This paper deals with the problem faced by a patentee owning a new production process whose value is unknown ex ante. The patentee must license the new technology to users in order to profit from it, and each potential licensee has production costs using the technology that are unknown to everyone until after contracting, at which point each licensee gets private information about her own costs. Moreover, the patentee cannot observe outputs of potential licensees and, therefore, must use lump-sum rather than per unit royalty schedules to license the technology. In this setting, the optimal licensing scheme from both the industry and the innovator viewpoints is defined, as well as the socially optimal dynamic industrial structure to market the technology. Welfare aspects of regulation on patents length are also discussed in this context.

Obesity: A major problem for Spanish minors

HIGHLIGHTSWe investigate the link between socioeconomic and demographic status and obesity prevalence in Spanish children, ages 2–15.Overall, the observed prevalence of obesity among children aged 2–15 is 10.6%.Obesity prevalence by age is nonlinear, increasing up to about age 5 and declining thereafter.Obesity prevalence among children 2–15 crucially depends of income, education, diet, sleeping habits and physical activity.

Duration and payment of licensing contracts for users to reveal what they know

Non-producing patent holders usually have to license their innovations to users capable of marketing them and usually ignore their market value. This article is aimed at analysing the dynamics of licensing contracts for an innovation that is owned by an independent patentee and is applied in the production of a good. Both contract duration (which may be the length of the patent or less) and per-license payment (which may be based on the licensees’ expected profits or an amount per unit of output they produce, but not both) are examined in Cournot competition when licensees enjoy privileged information on their own innovation-related production costs (i.e. the value of innovation for each one). The patent holder prefers to issue the licenses for less than the length of the patent rather than issuing them for the whole patent length. Besides, a series of period-by-period payments based on the licensees’ expected profits in each period is preferred over any payment collected from applying an amount to each unit produced by licensees. This is primarily because a series of annual payments based on licensees’ expected profits in each period induces them to report their type honestly through period-1 output at the least cost for the patent holder. Either a series of annual payments or a single initial payment (both based on licensees’ expected profits) also yield greater welfare than any other contractual scheme. However, the preferred outcome for the patentee – a series of payments based on licensees’ expected profits in each period – is socially efficient only when licensee-production costs disparity is large enough and the pre-license probability of having productively good applicants for the innovation is high enough.

A Dynamic Behavioral Model of the Credit Boom

Abstract We provide a dynamic model of banking competition, in which bounded rationality of some competitors explains how the credit cycle is intensified. We model the economic cycle following Tobias F. Rötheli (2012b), who argues that boundedly rational banks, in their Bayesian learning, overestimate the probability of success during booms and underestimate it during recessions. We obtain three main results. First, the model suggests that pessimism/underconfidence is not a powerful driver of credit cycles. Instead, it supports the conclusion that it is euphoria during large upswings that leads to the next crunch. Second, the dynamization of the model provides further insight into the way boundedly rational competition intensifies the credit cycle. Third, it additionally predicts that the effects of behavioral biases are more pervasive when the quality of the niche markets is lower.

Screening and Signalling for Technology Licensing: A Comparison

This article studies, in an adverse selection set‐up, how a patentee licenses a new technology in a two‐period context where the licensee has private information on its marginal cost of production. Two different ways of licensing are considered: the patentee offers, in the first period, either a menu of contracts that screens the different types of licensee or a single contract that obliges the licensee to signal its true type. Of these two contracts, the better for the patentee depends on the probability of the innovation gives rise to a low marginal cost and the difference between the high and low cost. Findings explain, to some degree, the variety of licensing contracts observed in practice (some including only a fixed fee, and others including both a royalty and a fixed fee). This variety may be rationalised by the use of different devices (signalling or screening) aimed at alleviating the effects of opportunism. A welfare comparison of the two means for extracting hidden information from the licensee is also made.

Option Contracts in a Vertical Industry: Option Contracts

We examine, in a vertical industry, the strategic role of horizontal subcontracting through option contracts by a downstream dominant firm competing with a competitive fringe. Downstream production requires an input from an upstream component-producing industry composed of imperfectly competitive suppliers. We characterize how the dominant firm may outsource downstream production from fringe firms in order to gain bargaining clout in the upstream input market. It is shown that option contracts are preferred to fixed-quantity forward contracts, because leverage against upstream suppliers is gained at lower contract prices. When there is no market uncertainty option contracts do not alter spot prices beyond that caused by unavoidable market power, whereas they increase price volatility whenever demand is subject to uncertainty.

On the Number of Licenses with Signalling

We analyse a two‐period licensing game in which a non‐producing upstream patent holder licenses an innovation that lasts for two periods to either one or two downstream users. Licensing is made through a payment based on a two‐part tariff, namely a fixed fee plus a royalty per output unit. Regarding the innovation value when commercialized by each user (high or low), we compare a symmetric information context where such value is publicly known with a situation in which users have private information about the value, but with their period‐1 output signalling that value. We find that the patent holder is more likely to prefer to grant two licenses under signalling than under symmetric information, which highlights the benefits of resorting to market competition between users to reduce the amount of informational rents.