Using standardised firm data a comparative analysis of the determinants of product and process innovation in manufacturing and services is performed. Results show that in services there are significant differences in innovation behaviour, in terms of intramural and extramural R&D. It is also found that size matters less in services than in manufacturing. Although youth has a positive effect in both cases, young service firms are more likely than young manufacturing of being pioneer innovators. The results reveal the importance of learning by doing in service process innovations, as young service firms are less likely to introduce process innovations.

This article analyzes the determinants of the European venture capital market, extending the equilibrium model from Jeng and Wells (2000). Our empirical model includes many of the determinants already tested in previous studies. In addition, we test whether the unemployment rate, the trade sale divestment and the price/book ratio are important factors in explaining venture capital. We use aggregated data from the European venture capital market as well as macroeconomic data, to estimate panel data models, with fixed and random effects. The random effects models revealed to be the most adequate. Our results confirm the importance of some of the already known factors and show that the unemployment rate and trade sale divestments are important determinants in the European venture capital market.

In this paper we investigate the impact of firms' pricing policies upon entry and welfare under duopoly price competition and product differentiation. We consider a model where an incumbent serves two distinct and independent geographical markets and an entrant may enter in one of the markets. Our results show that discriminatory pricing may be either more, less or equally favorable to entry than uniform pricing. The welfare effect of banning price discrimination is also ambiguous. However, the case for banning price discrimination is much weaker than under monopoly. Interestingly, discriminatory pricing may yield higher welfare even when entry occurs only under uniform pricing.

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This paper presents a model of delivered nonlinear pricing by duopolists operating in a linear city with two types of consumers and having incomplete information. At each location, the higher cost firm offers a uniform price equal to its delivered marginal cost while the lower cost firm offers a nonlinear tariff. For nearby locations, the lower cost firm may charge monopoly nonlinear prices, but as the distance increases the quantity consumed by the low valuation consumer becomes less inefficient than under monopoly. In the market region closest to the competitor's market we get an efficient outcome. If firms choose locations, before choosing tariff schedules, they will locate at the median of their equilibrium sales distribution.

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This article analyzes the exit decision in the European venture capital market, studying when to exit and how it interacts with the exit form. The paper emphasizes the impact of asymmetric information on the divestment decision. Our model considers the impact of characteristics of the venture capital investor, characteristics of the investment and contracting variables on the exit decision. Our results show that venture capitalists associated with …nancial institutions have quicker exits, a result which is stronger for trade-sales exits. In addition, our results highlight the importance of the contracting variables on the exit decision. An unexpected but interesting result is that the presence in the board of directors leads to longer investment duration.

This paper proposes a modeling approach to evaluate the impact of economic policies on the decision maker's behavior. This modeling approach incorporates the agent's preferences, estimated through utility elicitation methods, into the objective function of a discrete sequential stochastic programming model that describes the uncertainties and the constraints faced by the decision maker. Our approach was applied to nine farmers of Portugal. The elicitation of the farmers' preferences reveals that the Cumulative Prospect Theory is relevant to describe the farmers' behavior under risk. Our programming model was used to evaluate the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy with partial and full decoupling of subsidies.