User Acceptance of E-Collaboration Technology: An Extension of the Technology Acceptance Model

This study investigates the applicability of Davis' Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in the user acceptance of electronic collaboration technology. A courseware management tool is used to test the various findings of TAM. Perceived usefulness of the technology emerges as a positive impact on perceived usefulness, and usefulness, in turn, has a negative relationship with system usage. Additionally, certain aspects of system usage influenced student performance in the course. Prior use of the system also affected system use.     

Uncertainty, arbitrage and intra–industry trade

When firms in the same industry located in different regions or countries experience shocks to production costs in their respective industries that are imperfectly correlated, arbitrage opportunities automatically lead to trade. Trade can either stabilize or destabilize the price faced by producers in a given country. Producers' surplus is affected, owing to the 'variance–covariance' effect, while consumers' surplus is more directly affected through the variance of the product price. We examine how consumers' surplus, producers' surplus, and social welfare are affected when the regions switch from autarky to free trade in the presence of industry and region–specific cost shocks. JEL Classification: F10, D80
Incertitude, arbitrage et commerce intra–industrie. Quand les entreprises d'une même industrie localisées dans diverses régions ou différents pays font face à des chocs, qui ne sont pas parfaitement co–reliés, dans leurs coûts de production, les possibilités d'arbitrage entraînent automatiquement un accroissement du commerce. Ce commerce inter–régional ou international peut soit stabiliser ou déstabiliser les prix auxquels les producteurs font face dans un pays donné. Le surplus aux producteurs est directement affecté via l'effet de «variance–covariance>>, alors que le surplus aux consommateurs est plus directement affecté via la variance du prix du produit. Ce mémoire examine comment le surplus aux producteurs, le surplus aux consommateurs, et le niveau de bien–être social sont affectés quand les régions passent de l'autarcie au libre échange dans le cas où existent des chocs dans les coûts qui sont spécifiques à l'industrie et à la région.     

Patterns of Trade and Growth Under Increasing Returns: Escape from the Poverty Trap—a Comment

The paper generalizes a two-sector model of trade and growth in which the investment good sector exhibits an initial phase of increasing returns. It dispenses with the restriction that the utility function be of the isoelastic type. Allowing for general concave utility functions, it demonstrates that the qualitative properties of optimal growth and trade patterns are robust with respect to a wide choice of functional forms.
JEL Classification Numbers: O41, F12.     

Consistent firm choice and the theory of supply

Summary. This paper analyzes the problem of deriving predictions, regarding supply behavior of a competitive firm, from prior consistency postulates about input-output choices made by such a firm. It extends the literature by introducing a consistency postulate for firm choice, which is weaker than profit-maximization. This consistency postulate is nevertheless both necessary and sufficient for supply responses predicted by the standard theory of firm choice based on the postulate of profit-maximization. Furthermore, our rationality postulate, in conjunction with another condition, is shown to be equivalent to firm choice behavior that can be rationalized in terms of profit maximization.Received: 11 April 2003, Revised: 26 April 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D21.Indraneel Dasgupta: I thank Bhaskar Dutta and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions.     

Nature in Economics

Nature has been ill-served by 20th century economics. When asked, economists acknowledge nature’s existence, but most would appear to deny that she is worth much. If ecologists worry about the contemporary nexus between population size (and growth), the standard of living, and the natural environment, we economists point to the accumulation of capital and technological progress and say Malthus got it wrong. In this paper I show by an appeal to theory that economics has been so badly misused, that it has deflected attention from deep problems at the nexus that are faced both regionally and globally. Text of the President’s introductory remarks at the proceedings of Section F (Economics) of the BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) Festival of Science 2006, at the University of East Anglia, September 2006.     

Is there a plausible theory for decision under risk? A dual calibration critique

Can any prominent theory of decision under risk rationalize both small-stakes risk aversion and large-stakes risk aversion? Do some prominent theories fail to rationalize patterns of same-stakes risk aversion? How do reference payoffs enter in the answer to these questions? What would be the characteristics of a theory of decision under risk that would be immune to calibration critique? We offer a theoretical duality analysis that addresses these questions. We report dual propositions and corollaries that calibrate the implications of nonlinear transformation of probabilities or payoffs (or both). We also report several experiments that provide data on the empirical relevance of the two types of calibration patterns.     

Population, consumption and resources: ethical issues.

This article offers several models that test concepts of optimum population and consumption: classical or utilitarian models, contractual models, and generation-relative ethical models. This article is based on a lecture presented in August 1995, at a conference organized by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences. It is posited that classical utilitarianism casts the optimum population and consumption problem as a Genesis Problem. The authors argue that the Genesis problem is the wrong problem to study because there are no actual people. The Genesis problem asks how many people there ought to be ideally at what living standards. The unborn are not a class of people, just as mud on a river bank is not a mud hut. Actual persons and potential persons are categorically different. Actual persons have a claim that potential persons do not have. An overall ethical ordering over alternatives can only be conceived for each generation of actual people. The ethical point of view inevitably changes over time. For example, a generation in the first period consumes what they are given to consume by the older generation. In the second period, the younger generation is now the older generation who decide how many children to have and how to share nonstorable, all purpose consumption goods among themselves and future generations. Procreation is a means of making one's values durable. Human development is unfair. Those who live later benefit from the labor of their predecessors without paying the same price. Procreation and ecological preservation are a matter of ethics.