The illusions of competition in the water sector: a response to the OFWAT/Cave consultations on introducing competition in the water sector in England and Wales

The paper provides a critical review of the role of liberalisation and competition in the water sector, based on empirical evidence from the UK and internationally. The paper is submitted as evidence to the official reviews of competition in water sector in England and Wales.

Competition Relatedness And Efficiency

Seger has argued that, if a law of diminishing returns of personal fitness with increasing consumption of a limiting resource applies, a greater increment to inclusive fitness3 may accrue to an individual by sharing the resource with its relatives than by excluding them. That is, from the point of view of an individual's inclusive fitness, there will exist an optimal relation between resource abundance, conversion efficiency (in terms of increment in personal fitness per resource unit consumed) and competitor abundance and relatedness to the subject. Here, this is rendered more concrete by deriving expressions for the optimum consumption rate for any one of a number of related individuals competing for a finite resource.

Competition Drives Clumpy Species Coexistence in Estuarine Phytoplankton

Understanding the mechanisms that maintain biodiversity is a fundamental problem in ecology. Competition is thought to reduce diversity, but hundreds of microbial aquatic primary producers species coexist and compete for a few essential resources (e.g., nutrients and light). Here, we show that resource competition is a plausible mechanism for explaining clumpy distribution on individual species volume (a proxy for the niche) of estuarine phytoplankton communities ranging from North America to South America and Europe, supporting the Emergent Neutrality hypothesis. Furthermore, such a clumpy distribution was also observed throughout the Holocene in diatoms from a sediment core. A Lotka-Volterra competition model predicted position in the niche axis and functional affiliation of dominant species within and among clumps. Results support the coexistence of functionally equivalent species in ecosystems and indicate that resource competition may be a key process to shape the size structure of estuarine phytoplankton, which in turn drives ecosystem functioning.

Theorising European Integration: Revisiting Neo-Functionalism and Testing its Suitability for Explaining the Development of EC Competition Policy?

This paper was published in the highly respected, peer reviewed and ISI ranked journal - 'European Integration on-line paper series

Fragmentation of metastable SF6−* ions with microsecond lifetimes in competition with autodetachment

Fragmentation of metastable SF6-* ions formed in low energy electron attachment to SF₆has been investigated. The dissociation reaction SF6-*?SF5-+F has been observed ~ 1.5–3.4 µs and ~ 17–32 µs after electron attachment in a time-of-flight and a double focusing two sector field mass spectrometer, respectively. Metastable dissociation is observed with maximum intensity at ~ 0.3 eV between the SF6-* peak at zero and theSF5- peak at ~ 0.4 eV. The kinetic energy released in dissociation is low, with a most probable value of 18 meV. The lifetime of SF6-* decreases as the electron energy increases, but it is not possible to fit this decrease with statistical Rice–Ramsperger–Kassel/quasiequilibrium theory. Metastable dissociation of SF6-* appears to compete with autodetachment of the electron at all electron energies.