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The purpose of this paper is to investigate oil-gas slug formation in horizontal straight pipe and its associated pressure gradient, slug liquid holdup and slug frequency.

The abrupt change in gas/liquid velocities, which causes transition of flow patterns, was analyzed using incompressible volume of fluid method to capture the dynamic gas-liquid interface. The validity of present model and its methodology was validated using Baker’s flow regime chart for 3.15 inches diameter horizontal pipe and with existing experimental data to ensure its correctness.

The present paper proposes simplified correlations for liquid holdup and slug frequency by comparison with numerous existing models. The paper also identified correlations that can be used in operational oil and gas industry and several outlier models that may not be applicable.

The correlation may be limited to the range of material properties used in this paper.

Numerically derived liquid holdup and holdup frequency agreed reasonably with the experimentally derived correlations.

The models could be used to design pipeline and piping systems for oil and gas production.

The paper simulated all the seven flow regimes with superior results compared to existing methodology. New correlations derived numerically are compared to published experimental correlations to understand the difference between models.

Taking into consideration external (technology acceptance factors, website service quality) as well as internal (specific holdup cost) factors, this paper aims to explore how internet customer satisfaction and loyalty can be associated with each other and how they are affected by these dynamics.

This study adopts structural equation modelling (SEM) as the main analytical tool. It investigates the shopping experiences of users of the major shopping websites of Taiwan.

The research results point to the following: first, customer e‐satisfaction will positively influence customer e‐loyalty directly; second, technology acceptance factors will positively influence customer e‐satisfaction and e‐loyalty directly; third, website service quality can positively influence customer e‐satisfaction and e‐loyalty directly; and fourth, specific holdup cost can positively influence customer e‐loyalty directly, but cannot positively influence customer e‐satisfaction directly.

This paper draws on the research results for implications for shopping website management and design, then suggests some ways to enhance performance for the website shopping industry.

In this chapter, we propose a theoretical assessment of the relationship between unions and investments. We develop a simple model where a firm chooses its investment level anticipating the employee's effort choice and the outcome of wage bargaining. First, and consistently with the holdup view, we find that the union's bargaining power has a negative effect on the accumulation of fixed capital. Second, we show that this negative effect is mitigated by the voice ability of unions to ease the displeasure of exerting effort. Hence, when the voice ability of unions is strong vis-à-vis their bargaining power, the holdup view does not necessarily survive, and unionized firms invest more than their nonunionized competitors.

We study how different rules for allocating litigation costs impact on royalty negotiation when a non-practicing patent holder asserts its patent against a product developer.

A theoretical framework is proposed which distinguishes between three legal-cost allocation systems: the American system, where each party bears its own costs; the British system, where the loser incurs all costs; and the system favoring the defendant, where the defendant pays its own costs if it loses and nothing otherwise. The model considers both flat lawyer fees and contingency fees.

We first determine conditions under which, in the assumed contexts, the American system is preferable to the British one. Successively, we show that the less usual system favoring the defendant proves to be an interesting alternative.

In this way, in addition to extend the standard model of patent holdup, we furnish an analytical treatment of recent legislative proposals, such as the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act of 2013.

In many sectors property rights over knowledge and information are weak as they are embodied in employees, competitors can copy or customers can pirate. Yet comprehensive studies show that firms systematically invest in these assets. We offer a simple taxonomy of strategies that firms use to cope with weak property rights.We classify these strategies in three groups: (i) Some firms threaten offenders with strong competition. (ii) Other firms exploit complementarities and offer potential offenders a better deal than they can get elsewhere. (iii) And yet other firms exploit weak property rights and make profits on complementary assets or products that they can own.We go beyond taxonomy by showing when a particular strategy works. It depends systematically on the characteristics of both the asset and the investing firm.

The purpose of this paper is to perform the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation with experimental validation to investigate the particle segregation effect in abrupt and smooth shapes circulating fluidized bed (CFB) risers.

The experimental investigations were carried out in lab-scale CFB systems and the CFD simulations were performed by using commercial software BARRACUDA. Special attention was paid to investigate the gas-particle flow behavior at the top of the riser with three different superficial velocities, namely, 4, 6 and 7.7 m/s. Here, a CFD-based noble simulation approach called multi-phase particle in cell (MP-PIC) was used to investigate the effect of traditional drag models (Wen-Yu, Ergun, Wen-Yu-Ergun and Richardson-Davidson-Harrison) on particle flow characteristics in CFB riser.

Findings from the experimentations revealed that the increase in gas velocity leads to decrease the mixing index inside the riser. Moreover, the solid holdup found more in abrupt riser than smooth riser at the constant gas velocity. Despite the more experimental investigations, the findings with CFD simulations revealed that the MP-PIC approach, which was combined with different drag models could be more effective for the practical (industrial) design of CFB riser. Well agreement was found between the simulation and experimental outputs. The simulation work was compared with experimental data, which shows the good agreement (<4%).

The experimental and simulation study performed in this research study constitutes an easy-to-use with different drag coefficient. The proposed MP-PIC model is more effective for large particles fluidized bed, which can be helpful for further research on industrial gas-particle fluidized bed reactors. This study is expected to give throughout the analysis of CFB hydrodynamics with further exploration of overall fluidization.

Scholars of business, economics, and law have long recognized that rights to intellectual property (IP) intimately shape innovative activity and the pursuit of profits. More than 60 years ago, Michal Polanyi voiced the following concerns about awarding property rights to creations of the “intellect”:The law…aims at a purpose which cannot be rationally achieved. It tries to parcel up a stream of creative thought into a series of distinct claims, each of which is to constitute the basis of a separately owned monopoly. But the growth of human knowledge cannot be divided into such sharply circumscribed phases. Ideas usually develop gradually by shades of emphasis, and even when, from time to time, sparks of discovery flare up and suddenly reveal a new understanding, it usually appears that the new idea has been at least partly foreshadowed in previous speculations. (Polanyi, 1944, pp. 70–71)

Purpose – Land assembly can mitigate the negative environmental impacts of land fragmentation on urban areas, agriculture, and wildlife. However, the assembler faces several obstacles including transactions costs and the strategic bargaining behavior of landowners. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the order of bargaining and the nature of contracts may impact the land assembler's problem.

Methodology – We develop theoretical predictions of subjects' behavior and compare these to behavior in a laboratory land-assembly game with monetary incentives.

Findings – Sellers bargain more aggressively when bargaining is sequential compared to simultaneous. Noncontingent contracts increase bargaining delay and the likelihood of failed agreements. Buyers and sellers act more aggressively when there are multiple bargaining periods, leading to significant bargaining delay. When a seller has an earnings advantage in the laboratory, it is the first seller to bargain in noncontingent contract treatments. In sequential bargaining treatments, most sellers preferred to be the first seller to bargain.

Research limitations – Our laboratory experiments involved only two sellers, complete information, and costless delay. Land assembly in the field may involve many sellers, incomplete information, and costly delay.

Practical implications – Some of our results contradict conventional wisdom and a common result from the land-assembly literature that it is advantageous to be the last seller to bargain, a so-called “holdout.” Our results also imply that fully overcoming the holdout problem may require subsidies or compulsory acquisition.

Originality – This chapter is one of the first to experimentally investigate the land-assembly problem, and the first to specifically examine the role of bargaining order and contract type.

This paper focuses on the strategic inclusion of reciprocity clauses in the licensing commitments disclosed by firms claiming standard essential patents (SEPs) in the telecom industry. We highlight the main cost and benefit of using these clauses for SEPs holders, namely, a possible deterrence effect for potential standard users on the one hand, and a legal instrument to prevent holdup and negotiate cross-licenses with other SEPs owners on the other hand.

We formulate general hypotheses explaining firms’ disclosure strategies with respect to reciprocity clauses, and use an original dataset of 19,601 patent disclosures in 12 different ETSI (European Telecommunications Standard Institute) projects (including UMTS, GSM, 3GPP, or GPRS) to test them empirically.

Our econometric results first confirm our predictions that reciprocity clauses are used as an insurance mechanism in technologically complex environments. They are more frequently included in patent disclosures when the ownership of SEPs at the project level is more fragmented. We also find that firms do not claim reciprocity clauses before having already declared a significant number of non-reciprocal SEPs in the same project, which suggests a deterrence effect on standard users that must be balanced by a strong patent position.

Our findings highlight a trade-off for the SEPs holder to insert a reciprocity clause. There is both a cost and a benefit of adding this clause to the patent licensing commitment. Contrary to the usual literature on the subject, we do not analyze the general patenting strategies but the conducts on the licensing terms.

In an industrial marketing context of manufacturer–distributor collaboration, this law and economics paper aims to contrast two approaches to contracting: conventional and strategic.

Based on relational rent theory, this paper provides an analytical framework for juxtaposing conventional and strategic contracting. A contingency approach is applied to formulate propositions as to when conventional versus strategic contracting is preferable.

The distinction between conventional and strategic contracting has implications as to whether relational governance substitutes or complements formal contracts (the substitution versus complements perspectives). Strategic contracting results in complementarity (rather than substitutability) between formal contracts and relational governance.

This paper argues that a more nuanced view on contract types, such as strategic versus conventional, may reconcile the enduring research controversy between the substitution and complements perspectives.

Today, formal contracts with foreign distributors tend to resemble “prenuptial agreements”. The opportunity for relational rent (e.g. manifested in higher export revenues) grows if conventional contracts are superseded by contracts following strategic contracting principles.

This study is interdisciplinary, not only by its combination of marketing, management and contractual economics but also through its law and economics amalgamation.