Communication in dynastic repeated games: ‘Whitewashes’ and ‘coverups’

Summary. We ask whether communication can directly substitute for memory in dynastic repeated games in which short lived individuals care about the utility of their offspring who replace them in an infinitely repeated game. Each individual is unable to observe what happens before his entry in the game. Past information is therefore conveyed from one cohort to the next by means of communication.When communication is costless and messages are sent simultaneously, communication mechanisms or protocols exist that sustain the same set of equilibrium payoffs as in the standard repeated game. When communication is costless but sequential, the incentives to whitewash the unobservable past history of play become pervasive. These incentives to whitewash can only be countered if some player serves as a neutral historian who verifies the truthfulness of others reports while remaining indifferent in the process. By contrast, when communication is sequential and (lexicographically) costly, all protocols admit only equilibria that sustain stage Nash equilibrium payoffs.We also analyze a centralized communication protocol in which history leaves a footprint that can only hidden by the current cohort by a unanimous coverup. We show that in this case the set of payoffs that are sustainable in equilibrium coincides with the weakly renegotiation proof payoffs of the standard repeated game.Received: 30 September 2002, Revised: 5 August 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, C73, D82.We wish to thank an Associate Editor and Dino Gerardi as well as seminar participants at Arizona State, Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, Indiana, Montreal, Princeton, Rochester, Vanderbilt, VPI, the 2001 NSF/NBER Decentralization Conference, the Summer 2001 North American Econometric Society Meetings, and the Midwest Theory Conference, 2000, for useful comments and suggestions. All errors are our own.     

‘利用’与‘引进’关系谈

对利用外资,引进技术存在着两种认识:一种是把利用外资,引进技术当成一回事。第二种是没有把二者较好地结合起来。弄清楚利用外资对引进技术的作用,对做好利用外资工作和技术引进工作都有利。     

广州市副市长陈国:“实施‘森林围城’‘森林进城’战略”

近年来,广州大力实施森林围城、森林进城生态战略,森林总量不断增加,森林布局渐趋合理,生态环境明显改善。2006年末,全市林木绿化率     

Competing Hegemonic Projects within China's Variegated Capitalism: ‘Liberal’ Guangdong vs. ‘Statist’ Chongqing

This article investigates the variegated model of capitalism emerging in China through a comparative analysis of two contrasting local government approaches developed in Chongqing and Guangdong. From 2007 to 2012, elite politicians and intellectuals articulated the Chongqing and Guangdong models as contradictory visions for China. Drawing on a three-pronged conceptual framework developed by Bob Jessop, the article de- and reconstructs this dichotomy which has been embraced by some Western scholars. It is argued, first, that the two models involve complimentary accumulation strategies: as Guangdong moves up global value chains, Chongqing takes over many of its low-wage jobs in manufacturing sectors. Second, however, the two models do entail contrasting state projects. Guangdong's local government opened up more space for civil society organisations than normally allowed, whereas Chongqing's administrators reinforced China's state-led development path. Finally, it is highlighted how this difference between state projects is reflected in two antagonistic hegemonic visions for China's national development, illustrated by the populism of former Chongqing Party Chief Bo Xilai vs. the pro-business stance of his Guangdong counterpart Wang Yang. Future studies should expand upon the key theoretical insight of the paper: that the emergent variegated capitalism approach to political–economic analysis needs a stronger ideational component.     

Sectoral Changes in Employment: An eclectic perspective on ‘good’ jobs and ‘poor’ jobs

The linkage Keynes established between the volume of employment that business firms require to make a particular number of jobs available provides an operational perspective about the way in which labor markets work. The aggregate supply or Z function is, in fact, a job offer curve. The most significant insight to derive from this curve is that job offers are inseparable from the economy's aggregate expenditure (or demand) level. This interdependency of aggregate supply and aggregate demand is necessary to understand the functioning of labor markets in the real world. This paper argues that a disaggregated model which encapsulates the economy's price-taking and price-making sectors offers a promising analytical tool to gain perspective about ‘good jobs’ and ‘poor jobs’ in post-Fordist economies. It is maintained that the sectoral deployment of workers reflects whether employing firms, as price-makers, can capture the increasing returns inherent in modern technology.     

‘Factivism’: A New Configuration of Humanitarian Reason

New actors and ideas about poverty management and humanitarian assistance have arisen in recent years. The underlying context of this shift includes a growing awareness of the limitations and failures of both military forms of humanitarian intervention and unfettered market-based solutions to aid and development. This paper explores the particular form that global humanitarianism is taking in this millennial context. I argue that a new configuration of humanitarian reason is emerging that draws on both neoliberal and pastoral rationalities of governance. The former can be associated with efficiency, transparency, and quantitative evidence, while the latter is articulated with individual compassion, devotion, and Christian duty. Using the celebrity humanitarian Bono and his rhetoric of ‘factivism’ as an illustrative example, the paper explores the way that this message is transmitted through geosocial discourses and networks. It indicates some of the ways that the personal and media dissemination of this new ideology of charismatic, yet rational care helps to weave pastoral rationalities into forms of political authority.     

Inflationary expectations with heterogeneous information: ‘generational expectations’

This paper proposes a modified theory of expectation formation. The hypothesis of generational expectations (GE), unlike the widely accepted hypothesis of rational expectations, assumes that agents from their inflationary expectations using the most economical information set – their personal experience with inflation. The GE hypothesis incorporates the realistic assumptions of heterogenous information sets and bounded rationality. Several alternative expectational hypotheses are compared in terms of properties of inflation forecasts and estimates of a version of natural-rate aggregate supply functions and age-group-specific Phillips curves. It is shown that GE performs just as well or even better than other methods.     

Palestinian ‘Roadblock Movies’

Many of the Palestinian artists who began to direct films in the 1990s, had grown up under Israeli occupation, mainly in the West Bank, in refugee camps, in Gaza, and matured or worked in this decade of increasing national tension during and between the two intifadas. These filmmakers have found it difficult to create the spaces that previous cinema succeeded in creating in their films. They also found it difficult to deconstruct this space as did previous directors (Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman or Rashid Masharawi). As the intifada strengthened and the Israeli occupation became more deeply felt, the entire space seemed to be threatened, narrowed or reduced, and the films found it difficult to encompass the wholeness and unity of the home and the outside, to describe the mundane life within them, and to connect them to past times. Many of them also failed to preserve the ambivalence and heterogeneity that made it possible, in previous films, to create the national story from – and through – individual stories, and to connect the private place to the public one. Since the end of the 1990's, and now, at the beginning of the present decade, it has become difficult for the Palestinian cinema both to create and to deconstruct a whole imaginary map – and to produce from this map a heterogeneous, multi-cultural space. In the films made in the 1990s and 2000s the public space is blocked, the private space is missing or destroyed, and the only place left intact is the border.

In this case, however, the border is not the defining line that might divide, as Tuathail and Dalby phrase it, us from them. It does not part any longer the world into good and evil ⁱ Tuathail & Dalby (note 25) p.1. and does not leave the demonic effects out. On the other hand, the border is not a threshold linking between cultural identities.

The article traces the difficulty the Palestinian films of the 90s face in presenting “visual order of space”, in mapping the Palestinian territory with the aid of the camera or by editing, in clearly distinguishing between the inside and the outside. On the other hand the article analyzes the impossibility, in this situation of an insecure territory, to describe “plurality of space and the multiplicity of possible political constructions of space”, to create maps that put the dispersed pieces together to form a “larger picture and to draw out connections and causalities between them”.

The article also summarizes the strategies recent Palestinian cinema uses in order to overcome these impasses.     

出口创汇的‘三字经’

发展外向型经济,就是要多出口创汇,为此要用好三字经,即产品要新,质量要高,价格要低。一、推陈出新。萍乡市上栗焰花厂生产的“穿云火箭”在国际市场上曾畅销了一阵子,后因不少国家对焰花的欣赏已从空中转入地面,这样一来,畅销品变成滞销品,压库量增大。     

The Demise of ‘International Relations’: America's Western Palimpsest

By the end of the nineteenth century, the map of the U.S. no longer revealed the historic encounter of nationhoods between Euro- and Native Americans. The changes in the map articulated the process though which what had been foreign policy on the continent had been displaced by various version of racial politics. Two films are the book ends of this analysis, whose middle section treats the way classis westerns, particularly those directed by John Ford, supply insights into the Euro American geo- and biopolitical “ethnogenesis,” their ethnically privileged and territorially pervasive presence on the North American continent. I begin with Sean Penn's The Pledge (2001) and conclude with Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984). While it is unlikely that the “international relations” that characterized the American continent will be restored, these two films (and other genres of popular culture) remind us of the politics of America's cartographic history.     

Enrico Barone's ‘Ministry of Production’: Content and Context

Abstract

Enrico Barone's famous article on economic planning, ‘Il Ministro della Produzione nello Stato Collettivista’ (‘The Ministry of Production in the Collectivist State’), which showed the theoretical possibility of an economically efficient collectivist planned economy, was published in Giornale degli Economisti in 1908. Barone's article has been widely cited, particularly in the comparative economic systems literature, but it has not been very widely read or analysed in recent years, and there is not much literature that places Barone's ‘Ministry’ model in the context of his other works or in its historical, social, or ideological context. The aims of this article are: (a) to analyse and clarify Barone's model in depth; (b) to place it in the context of Barone's other writings and the literature on the subject; and (c) to examine the apparent contradiction between Barone's hostility to socialism and his attempt to formulate the pure theory of the collectivist economy.     

Trade and the environment: from a ‘Southern’ perspective

The relationship between free trade and the environment is one of the main issues of contention between environmental and ecological economics. Environmental economics assumes a positive relationship between free trade, economic growth and environmental policies. Environmental externalities may cause important damage. However, trade is not to be blamed for this. Instead, the fault lies with policy inadequacies at the national level. On the other hand, some ecological economists criticise the assumptions of environmental economics, especially the immobility of production factors and the positive correlation between income and environmental quality. They plead for measures to prevent deterioration of ‘Northern’ environmental standards in a ‘race to the bottom’ due to ‘ecological dumping” from the South. In this paper, we argue that neither environmental economics nor ‘Northern’ ecological economics take into account the structural conditions determining the international trade system. Based on some new empirical evidence on material flows, we stress the notion of environmental cost-shifting. If physical and political ecology perspectives are adopted, a ‘Southern’ approach to the trade-and-environment issue may arise.     

A History of Violence: Mearsheimer and Walt's Writings from ‘An Unnecessary War’ to the ‘Israel Lobby’ Controversy

Realist academics wrote some of the most lucid critiques of the geopolitics of anger initiated after 9/11 by the Bush administration: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in particular, began to interrogate the War on Terror with lines of inquiry that lead back to the critiques of U.S. foreign policy—and the ‘fantasies’ and ‘self-deception’ of policy makers—developed in the 1960s by Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt. But then Walt and Mearsheimer published controversial essays on ‘The Israel Lobby’ based on arguments developed in Walt's Taming American Power. What interests me in the paper is accounting for a curious move that occurs in the writings of Mearsheimer and Walt since 9/11. By the time that we arrive at Walt's Taming American Power and the essays on ‘The Israel Lobby’, critical commentary on the ‘self-deception’ of policy makers and the problems with neo-conservatism has largely disappeared, replaced with an anxiety over the Israel lobby that appears overstated. It is argued that the emphasis on foreign ‘penetration’ is a means of postponing a broader interrogation of the domestic, internal problems of democracy and war in the United States.     

汕头市的‘三资’企业

<正> 吸引外商前来我国投资办企业,是利用外资的重要途径,从“三资”企业的发展又可以看出一个地区利用外资发展地方经济的情况,汕头市(含汕头经济特区)已有外商投资企业594家,还有“三来一补”企业4637家,协议外资额近6亿美元,实际利用外资3.2亿美元。外商前来汕头投资合作经营和开发的项目主要