Enabling Community-Owned Platforms: A Proposal for a Tech New Deal

At a time when regulators are seeking new responses to the dilemmas of world-spanning digital platforms, forms of community ownership such as cooperatives and trusts offer attractive benefits for workers and other users. Yet if economic democracy is to provide a counterweight to investor ownership in the online economy, it will require an appropriate policy framework. This paper argues that such a framework can come from radically generalizing and expanding on pre-digital successes in local and industry-specific policies from various countries and contexts—including policies for incorporation, financing, and coordination. Policy should use community ownership not just to solve specific problems but as a universal means of organizing innovation. It should also seek to repair past injustices to communities marginalized through under-investment. Community ownership could thereby become at least as available to the online economy as investor ownership has been.

Rebate Strategy Selection and Channel Coordination of Competing Two-Echelon Supply Chains

Rebate has long been a crucial tool that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including marketing and supply chain management. When a manufacturer uses a retailer for reaching end customers, the rebate strategy undertakes an additional dimension. Here we show whether the two rebate strategies, manufacturer rebate and channel rebate, can be the optimal choice for the manufacturer and the retailer. And we aim at full coordination with rebate. Game theory is exploited to identify the equilibrium rebate decisions, which are fully characterized with two rebate strategies considering rebate sensitivity. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the decisions depend on parameters, such as market size, rebate redemption rate, and competition intensity in monopoly and duopoly supply chain systems. Our work also coordinates the supply chain with two coordination policies and examines if they can achieve full coordination. Counterintuitive findings suggest that the channel rebate with sensitivity and discrimination is not effective and the manufacturer rebate is the unique optimal option. Besides, the coordination can be realized with a centralized rebate in monopoly setting when the manufacturer forgoes her own interest. Then full coordination can be achieved in duopoly setting with a new coordination policy, rebate combination, given the redemption rate for the channel rebate is lower compared with the manufacturer rebate. Managerial insights are suggested that offering rebates with discrimination can have significant inventory and coordination policy implications and can lead to a double win under a well-controlled redemption rate.

Intergovernmental veto points in crisis management: Italy and Spain facing the COVID-19 pandemic

Italy and Spain were the first countries affected by the shift of the pandemic epicentre from east to west. The rapid spread of the virus in allegedly similar social settings, the relatively high numbers of cases and casualties, and the adoption of drastic containment measures were similar in the two countries during the first wave of the pandemic. Both countries are enmeshed in an unstable political equilibrium at the centre, governed by recently established national political coalitions that have continuously been called into question and exposed to significant public debt. The two countries differ in the role of the executive vis-a-vis the legislative, and the tensions between central coordination and regional centrifugal forces. To improve the understanding of how the pandemic has influenced decision-making and crisis management, this article explains the relevance of institutional veto points, as well as differences between the two countries. There is room to match coordination, policy capacity and shared accountability through more collaborative governance. Points for practitioners Governing a transboundary crisis that involves different governmental levels is about creating an effective coordination mechanism that clarifies responsibilities, avoiding those who may block decision-making processes (veto players) through being incentivized to do so due to the absence of adequate shared accountability systems. National and regional managers should realize that the separation of territorial powers not accompanied by political coordination jeopardizes policy capacity in both the short and long term.

How professions make intersectoral governance happen in the context of Denmark

Background Intersectoral governance is recognised as key to achieving better healthcare, but our understanding of how to make this happen is limited. Earlier studies on individual professionals fail to acknowledge the resources of health professions as collective actors and pay very little attention to professional agency to support intersectoral governance. The aim is to add new knowledge on how professions contribute to intersectoral governance in healthcare. Methods The study develops a novel conceptual framework, distinguishing between the what, the how and the why of professional agency. The study is based on a secondary analysis of five qualitative case studies of coordination in Denmark, conducted 2011-8 and with a total of 89 hours observations, 18 focus groups, 36 interviews. The case selection identified studies from different organisational settings. Coordination was the key indicator of intersectoral governance and used for coding and for drawing up a data display for more systematic analysis. Results Health professions engage in a wide range of coordination activities; this includes documenting, monitoring, meeting, giving practical support and teaching. Health professions employ diverse mechanisms to adapt coordination activities to local contexts; this is about flexibility and combining mechanisms in a highly tailored way. When they engage in coordination activities, health professions draw on two different rationales: one relates to better healthcare services for patients, the other to professional interests, including work conditions. Conclusions Health professions engage in coordination that spans sectors, organisations and/or professional groups; thus professions are key to making intersectoral governance happen. Key messages Health professions have many resources highly relevant for coordination. Policy and administrative decision makers need to better support health professions to strengthen intersectoral governance.

The Selective Harmonization Impact of the Coordination Policy

The strong interdependence of Member States’ legal orders was the reason why Member States decided for coordination and for monitoring each other’s legislative activity. Over the years, the Contracting States and the Union legislature have established more and more obligations referring to national legislatures in this respect. The most common of these are the well-known duties to transpose directives into national law. These EU legal acts contain substantive law, rights and/or obligations for individuals, and thus encompass material provisions that can be subject to a transposition process. However, this EU-wide harmonization is not the only way to influence national legal orders. This article deals with the kind of formal obligations which compel Member States to consult EU institutions on draft laws during their national legislative procedures. These obligations are of a procedural nature, with the outcome of the consultation procedure resulting in substantive law. This article shows that in respect to the Information Directive, the Court applies different criteria of inapplicability than it does for ‘typical’ or harmonizing directives. The Court examines the breach of the obligation to notify contained in the Information Directive, particularly if the criterion constituting a ‘substantial procedural defect’ renders such technical regulations inapplicable so that they may not be enforced against individuals. The Information Directive used to enjoy great attention from legal scholars and national courts as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union. The latter confirmed the Information Directive’s direct applicability in several cases. Sometimes it did not heed opinions of the General Advocates and established settled case law in this regard. In other cases, however, it declined the enforcement of this directive in proceedings between private parties. The goal was to avoid disruptions of the internal market. It thus limited the impact of the unconditional procedural obligations resulting from the Information Directive to cases impacting the internal market only. This may have been necessary since obligations to consult constitute unconditional duties and all Member States’ draft laws are supposed to be notified with no difference as to whether they refer to the internal market or not. The wording of the obligations to consult EU institutions rules that the Member State issuing a new law may act and – if it so desires – enforce the new national law. However, the state is not completely free in doing so: it cannot conduct the legislative process from beginning to end.

Issues of implementing the state program of energy saving and energy efficiency

The article discusses the main issues of energy saving and energy efficiency in the Russian Federation, in particular, the issues of implementing state policy and development of energy management in the region. The authors define the concept of “energy saving” through the prism of subject of regulation, which more fully reveals the whole range of relations of energy saving, corresponding to the essence of legal regulation. The purpose of the study is to analyze legal and managerial problems of implementation of state program on energy saving and energy efficiency in the framework of regional management. The scientific novelty of the study consists in studying problems of energy saving and energy efficiency in the implementation of regional legislative establishments and issues of effectiveness of energy management in the region. The leading approach to the study of this problem is dialectic, analysis, synthesis, formal legal and comparative legal method. Conclusions: First, the state program of energy saving and energy efficiency at the regional level is not being implemented effectively enough. The main problem lies in weak coordination policy of interaction between the region and municipalities in organizing and conducting activities aimed at effective energy saving in the region. Secondly, the use of energy-saving technologies at industrial sites and business facilities is fairly low. Thirdly, there is no comprehensive legal study of this area of relations, and scientific papers are fragmentary.