Historical models and economic syllogisms

This paper proposes a classification of economic models into three types: historical, axiomatic and conditional. Historical or empirical models utilize the historical-deductive method, and are generalizations from the economic regularities and tendencies that we find in the real world. Axiomatic models utilize the hypothetical-deductive method; they are syllogisms whose major premise is an axiom – a self-evident truth; they are appropriate for methodological sciences such as mathematics and econometrics. Conditional economic models are likewise syllogisms, but they are suitable for economics because they make for clearer and more precise economic reasoning. The criterion of truth of the substantive sciences is the conformity with reality, of the methodological science, its internal consistency. When a school of economic thought adopts mainly axiomatic models, as is the case with neoclassical economics, it implicitly falls into contradiction because their best representatives believe in the conformity with reality criterion.     

Modelling seasonality in innovation diffusion

The ability to forecast new product growth is especially important for innovative firms that compete in the marketplace. Today many new products exhibit very strong seasonal behaviour, which may deserve specific modelling, both for producing better forecasts in the short term and for better explaining special market dynamics and related managerial decisions. By considering seasonality as a deterministic component to be estimated jointly with the trend through Nonlinear Least Squares methods, we have developed two extensions of the Guseo–Guidolin model that are able to simultaneously describe trend and seasonality. Such models are based on two different but equally reasonable approaches: in one case we consider a simple additive decomposition of a time series and design a model in which seasonality is directly added to the trend and jointly estimated with it; in the other we design a more complex structure, mimicking that of a Generalized Bass model and embed two separate seasonal perturbations within the dynamic market potential and the corresponding adoption process. The different characteristics of two products, a pharmaceutical drug and an IT device, make it possible to appreciate empirically various modelling options and performances. Both models are quite simple to implement and to interpret from a managerial point of view.     

Investment behaviour in transition countries and computable general equilibrium models

When applying Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models to transition economies, it is not plausible to use the standard assumption that the base year data represent stable structural characteristics or even the steady state of the economy. The suggestions forwarded until now to overcome this problem are discussed in this article. An amendment is proposed by modifying the investment modelling within the dynamic CGE setting. The standard formulation of installation costs for capital is extended through the inclusion of adjustment costs that depend on the change of the investment level. Such formulation of the adjustment costs within the dynamic CGE model leads to an investment behaviour that mirrors the empirical data of the first years of the transition.     

The historical development of the consumption of sweeteners - a learning approach

From a theoretical point of view, addressing the adoption of novelty and change in consumption is a topic of major interest since it challenges the axiomatic foundations of modern microeconomics. Starting from the “continuity hypothesis” which considers the evolution of culture to be based on biological evolution, an evolutionary approach is presented which highlights the role of consumer learning. By means of a case study on the complex consumption history of sweeteners, it is shown that this approach complements the Lancasterian characteristics approach to the adoption of novelty in consumption in a fruitful way.JEL Classification: B52, D11, D12, Q13The author thanks Guido Buenstorf, Klaus Rathe and Ulrich Witt for helpful discussions and comments.     

干旱区绿洲生态农业现代化模式研究

西北地区是我国典型的干旱区,水资源匮乏、生态脆弱和气候干燥等因素是干旱区的主要特征,在该区农业现代化的进程中这些特点是不容忽视的。文章从农业现代化模式含义的理解入手,通过对国内外先进农业模式的研究,借鉴其在发展过程中的经验与教训,总结出适合西北干旱区绿洲生态农业发展的现代化模式,并将模式定位于滴灌大田精准农业现代化模式、滴灌设施农业模式、滴灌特色林果(药)复合农业模式与现代农业示范园区模式。     

A theory of (relative) discounting

We derive a representation theorem for time preferences (on the prize-time space) which identifies a novel notion of relative discounting as the key ingredient. This representation covers a variety of time preference models, including the standard exponential and hyperbolic discounting models and certain non-transitive time preferences, such as the similarity-based and subadditive discounting models. Our axiomatic work thus unifies a number of seemingly disparate time preference structures, thereby providing a tractable mathematical format that allows for investigating certain economic environments without subscribing to a particular time preference model. This point is illustrated by means of an application to sequential bargaining theory.     

Multi-agent simulations to explore rules for rural credit in a highland farming community of Northern Thailand

Multi-agent systems (MAS) open new modelling and analysis perspectives in ecological and social sciences. An original characteristic of the companion modelling (ComMod) approach adopted in this case study is the co-construction and use of a MAS model with and for local stakeholders such as farmers and local administrators. Alternating iteratively field and modelling activities, this approach facilitates collective learning among local stakeholders and between them and the researchers. Combining the use of MAS models with role-playing games (RPG), the described experiment aimed to facilitate collective decision-making in a socially heterogeneous community of small farmers in mountainous Northern Thailand about the local rules for the allocation of rural credit to allow a more equitable and extensive process of expansion of non-erosive perennial crops in a watershed prone to erosion. This paper presents the MAS model and the results of a series of simulations exploring the ecological, social and economic effects of various rules for formal and informal credit suggested by the villagers-participants. Six scenarios considered as pertinent to further explore the participants' suggestions were defined based on different combinations among the following three variables: (i) Duration for the reimbursement of loans, (ii) Mode of allocation of formal credit among three different types of farms, (iii) Configuration of networks of acquaintances for access to informal credit.Drawing on this case study, we first elaborate on the potential of bottom-up models such as MAS to analyze the functioning of agricultural systems, in particular farm differentiation and rural credit dynamics. We highlight the ability of MAS to deal with interactions between social and ecological dynamics and to provide an alternative to classical economic thinking by analyzing the effects at the village level of social interactions among individuals. MAS allow us in particular to trigger an overlooked but nevertheless fundamental aspect of socio-ecological systems, i.e. social capital which is a determining factor when dealing with sustainability issues. The second question addressed in this paper deals with the potential and limits of MAS models to support a bottom-up (or participatory) modelling approach. This experiment suggests that the usefulness of models relies much more on the modelling process than on the model itself, because a model is usually useless if it is misunderstood by its potential users, or if it does not respond to their current preoccupations. The intuitive representation of real systems provided by MAS and their high flexibility are the two underlined characteristics favouring their appropriation by local stakeholders.     

推动四川省工业园区生态化发展研究

推进产业生态化和工业生态园区的研究对于我国经济发展和资源环境状况而言,是十分迫切的任务.生态工业园区所具有的工业链条、循环经济模式、经济外部性以及企业之间的复合共生等生态化发展特征是推动当地生态工业经济发展的重要路径.本文结合四川省工业园区发展的现状,从理论上探讨了工业园区发展与生态经济发展的关系,从实践上.研究了推动四川省工业园区生态化发展的路径和政策建议.     

How modern economics learned French: Jacques Drèze and the foundation of CORE

The Center of Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), founded in 1966, was one of the channels through which economic modelling practices were imported from the USA to Europe. Officially modelled after the Cowles Foundation for Economics Research, it reflected Jacques Drèze's broad experiences in the USA during the 1950s when modelling techniques were not yet anchored in disciplines. CORE gained an international reputation, however, through the rather exclusive community of Neo-Walrasian economists represented by Werner Hildenbrand, Jean Gabszewicz, and Gérard Debreu. After this community modified the disciplinary divisions at CORE, the influence of CORE on continental economics occurred mainly through disequilibrium economics, which still represents a “French accent” in modern macroeconomics. At the same time, operations research and econometrics prospered at CORE while receiving scant attention from economists. This essay tells the story of how CORE changed continental economics through the unique career path of its founder, Jacques Drèze.     

Integrated bio-economic models as tools to support land-use decision making: a review of potential and limitations

Bio-economic modelling has become a useful tool for anticipating the outcomes of policies and technologies before their implementation. Advances in mathematical programming have made it possible to build more comprehensive models. In an overview of recent studies about bio-economic models applied to land-use problems in agriculture and forestry, we evaluated how aspects such as uncertainty, multiple objective functions, system dynamics and time have been incorporated into models. We found that single objective models were more frequently applied at the farm level, while multiple objective modelling has been applied to meet concerns at the landscape level. Among the objectives, social aspects are seldom represented in all models, when being compared to economic and environmental aspects. The integration of uncertainty is occasionally a topic, while stochastic approaches are more frequently applied than non-stochastic robust methods. Most multiple-objective models do not integrate uncertainty or sequential decision making. Static approaches continue to be more recurrent than truly dynamic models. Even though integrating multiple aspects may enhance our understanding of a system; it involves a tradeoff between complexity and robustness of the results obtained. Land-use models have to address this balance between complexity and robustness in order to evolve towards robust multiple-objective spatial optimization as a prerequisite to achieve sustainability goals.     

Maximizing votes under imperfect information

This paper presents an alternative, sympathy voting, to the usual public choice approaches. It deals with voters whose decision depends both on an economic component and a sympathy component. The politician is perfectly informed of the economic component, but not of the sympathy component. The paper compares vote maximization under sympathy voting to the maximization of votes which come from pure homines oeconomici. Sympathy voting is defined in such a way that pure economic voting is its limiting case. The latter property can be used to apply the classical Lagrangean technique to maximizing votes under economic voting. The approach is applied to two typical examples of political choice: the property tax/local public expenditure decision, and public pricing of local public utilities.     

The structure of income mobility: empirical evidence from five UE countries

In this paper we use the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to assess differences in the level and structure of income mobility in a selected sample of European countries. We adopt recent theoretical proposals for the decomposition of axiomatic and welfare measurements of mobility in exchange, structural and growth components. Decomposition exercises which take into account some type of division of the population and income sources are also performed. We find that cross-country income mobility comparisons largely depend on the type of indices used. The relative positions of the countries considered change when the analysis is based on ethical instead of objective measures of income mobility. Results also show that in most countries income growth has a very limited effect upon aggregate mobility, being the most important determinant the rerankings of individuals, with a little weight for inequality changes. Although some common results exist concerning the delimitation of groups experiencing the greatest income fluctuations, such as individuals belonging to single-parent households or young household heads, the intensity of these results varies greatly across countries. The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology (grant SEJ2004-07373-c03-03) and the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales. We would also like to acknowledge the help given by the European Centre for Analysis in Social Sciences of the University of Essex.     

Norms as emergent properties of adaptive learning: The case of economic routines

Interaction among autonomous decision-makers is usually modelled in economics in game-theoretic terms or within the framework of General Equilibrium. Game-theoretic and General Equilibrium models deal almost exclusively with the existence of equilibria and do not analyse the processes which might lead to them. Even when existence proofs can be given, two questions are still open. The first concerns the possibility of multiple equilibria, which game theory has shown to be the case even in very simple models and which makes the outcome of interaction unpredictable. The second relates to the computability and complexity of the decision procedures which agents should adopt and questions the possibility of reaching an equilibrium by means of an algorithmically implementable strategy. Some theorems have recently proved that in many economically relevant problems equilibria are not computable. A different approach to the problem of strategic interaction is a “constructivist” one. Such a perspective, instead of being based upon an axiomatic view of human behaviour grounded on the principle of optimisation, focuses on algorithmically implementable “satisfycing” decision procedures. Once the axiomatic approach has been abandoned, decision procedures cannot be deduced from rationality assumptions, but must be the evolving outcome of a process of learning and adaptation to the particular environment in which the decision must be made. This paper considers one of the most recently proposed adaptive learning models: Genetic Programming and applies it to one the mostly studied and still controversial economic interaction environment, that of oligopolistic markets. Genetic Programming evolves decision procedures, represented by elements in the space of functions, balancing the exploitation of knowledge previously obtained with the search of more productive procedures. The results obtained are consistent with the evidence from the observation of the behaviour of real economic agents.     

工程管理硕士专业学位教育的国际经验及其启示

国外的工程管理硕士专业学位教育发展较为成熟,通过审视其发展过程及培养方式,发现其培养过程中强调学生的工程技术背景,跨学科培养并注重实践教学,拥有成熟的质量评估认证体系以及差异化的办学定位等。我国工程管理硕士专业学位教育的科学发展应充分借鉴国际经验,突出复合型特征,明确人才培养定位;服务经济增长方式转变,科学设置培养方案;坚持企业的积极参与;实现工程管理硕士专业学位教育的国际化。     

On the distributional effects of income in an aggregate consumption relation

Abstract .  In this paper we analyse the influence of characteristics of the income distribution in modelling aggregate consumption expenditure. We model the aggregate consumption relation of a heterogeneous population, using a statistical distributional approach of aggregation, and apply it to UK-Family Expenditure Survey data. A bootstrap test based on a non-parametric estimation methodology, which accounts for the presence of continuous and discrete variables, suggests that the mean and the dispersion of the income distribution significantly influence aggregate consumption expenditure. Also, the parameters of the aggregate relation are time varying. These findings have implications for constructing empirically sound models of aggregate consumption expenditure.     

Noncompensatory/nonlinear composite indicators for ranking countries: a defensible setting

Composite indicators (or indexes) are very common in economic and business statistics for benchmarking the mutual and relative progress of countries in a variety of policy domains such as industrial competitiveness, sustainable development, globalization and innovation. The proliferation of the production of composite indicators by all the major international organizations is a clear symptom of their political importance and operational relevance in policy-making. As a consequence, improvements in the way these indicators are constructed and used seem to be a very important research issue from both the theoretical and operational points of view. This article aims at contributing to the improvement of the overall quality of composite indicators (or indexes) by looking at one of their technical weaknesses, that is, the aggregation convention used for their construction. For this aim, we build upon concepts coming from multi-criteria decision analysis, measurement theory and social choice. We start from the analysis of the axiomatic system underlying the mathematical modelling commonly used to construct composite indicators. Then a different methodological framework, based on noncompensatory/nonlinear aggregation rules, is developed. Main features of the proposed approach are: (i) the axiomatic system is made completely explicit and (ii) the sources of technical uncertainty and imprecise assessment are reduced to the minimum possible degree.     

论安徒生童话的忧郁色彩

安徒生的童话创作是他整个思想感情和人生经历的艺术结晶,他的经典童话呈现出浓厚的忧郁色彩。卑微的出身、失败的艺术追求、上流社会的歧视使安徒生饱尝人生的艰辛,使得他的童话弥漫在忧郁氛围当中,表现出浓重的忧郁情结。屡遭冷遇的爱情追求,近乎绝望的情感体悟,社会现实的黑暗残酷,激起了安徒生的强烈愤懑和无比悲痛。安徒生童话悲愤而不悲观,沉郁而不消极,散发出迷人的魅力,集中体现在其悲剧性童话人物形象身上不屈不挠的抗争精神。     

Examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities — Part 2: Review of input-output models for the assessment of environmental impacts embodied in trade

This paper offers a detailed review of recently described single- and multi-region input-output models used to assess environmental impacts of internationally traded goods and services. It is the second part of a two-part contribution. In Part 1 [Turner, K., Lenzen, M., Wiedmann, T. and Barrett, J. in press. Examining the Global Environmental Impact of Regional Consumption Activities — Part 1: A Technical Note on Combining Input-Output and Ecological Footprint Analysis; Ecological Economics.] we describe how to enumerate the resource and pollution content of inter-regional and inter-national trade flows with the aim to illustrate an ideal accounting and modelling framework for the estimation of Ecological Footprints.A large number of such environment-economic models have been described but only in the last few years models have emerged that use a more sophisticated multi-region, multi-sector input-output framework. This has been made possible through improvements in data availability and quality as well as computability. We identify six major models that employ multi-sector, multi-region input-output analysis in order to calculate environmental impacts embodied in international trade. Results from the reviewed studies demonstrate that it is important to explicitly consider the production recipe, land and energy use as well as emissions in a multi-region, multi-sector and multi-directional trade model with global coverage and detailed sector disaggregation. Only then reliable figures for indicators of impacts embodied in trade, such as the Ecological Footprint, can be derived.     

Dynamic management view: logic of profit seeking based on adaptation to technological change and needs evolution through needs-focused innovation

Scrutinising well-known models/theories in strategic management, this paper proposes dynamic management view (DMV) on the premise profit comes from adaptation to technological change and needs evolution through needs-focused innovation in a dynamic world. It firstly sets up the theoretical framework of DMV by taking business model to embrace explicit needs (the ultimate source of profit) and needs-focused innovation (the ultimate driver of profit seeking) as the very causal mechanism at the micro-foundations level, and technological change and needs evolution as the direct causal mechanisms of profit at the macro-foundations level from which it draws the universal and contingency rules of needs-focused innovation, derives the propositions about the adaptive goodness between explicit needs and needs-focused innovation, shows it works as the determinant of profit with the industrial experiences, and concludes DMV provides the rationale for a firm’s sustainability, the strategic decision rules for business model innovation and the theoretical foundation to build dynamic theory of profit seeking.     

The behavioral foundations of Austrian economics

Behavioral and experimental economics present challenges to the neoclassical theory of individual behavior, which is based on individuals making choices within the framework of utility functions that are assumed to have certain well-defined characteristics. Results in behavioral and experimental economics have shown that it is common for individual behavior to systematically deviate from the neoclassical axioms of utility maximization. Austrian economics is also based on axiomatic theories of utility maximization, but the assumptions underlying utility-maximizing behavior are much weaker in the Austrian approach. As a result, they have more solid behavioral foundations and are less subject to challenge by the empirical findings of behavioral and experimental economics. Neoclassical policy conclusions are often overly strong because of its behavioral foundations which are challenged by behavioral and experimental economics and are often misleading because of the comparative static nature of neoclassical welfare economics. For purposes of policy analysis, the Austrian approach provides better insights because of its more realistic behavioral foundations.