Globalisation as commodification

While recognising that most pre-capitalist formations exhibitedelements of commodity exchange, Marx argued that capitalismdifferentiates itself as a genuine commodity system by virtueof two interdependent processes having reached a critical stageof development: a ‘stretching’ of commodity relationsto the point where production for the market displaces subsistenceproduction as the primary form; and a ‘deepening’of commodity relations such that these encompass not only goodsand services but the capacities for producing them. This paperargues that globalisation can best be understood as the culminatingstage of these stretching and deepening processes: the formerin the sense that commodity relations now embrace the entireplanet and the latter in the sense that they cover not merelygoods, or the capacities for producing goods, but also everyother type of capacity and every other type of outcome.     

Strategies as states

We define rationality and equilibrium when states specify agents’ actions and agents have arbitrary partitions over these states. Although some suggest that this natural modeling step leads to paradox, we show that Bayesian equilibrium is well defined and puzzles can be circumvented. The main problem arises when player j's partition informs j of i's move and i knows j's strategy. Then i's inference about j's move will vary with i's own move, and i may consequently play a dominated action. Plausible conditions on partitions rule out these scenarios. Equilibria exist under the same conditions, and more generally ε equilibria usually exist.     

Grades as incentives

This paper examines how grade incentives affect student learning across a variety of courses at two universities, using for identification the discrete rewards offered by the standard A–F letter-grade system. We develop and test five predictions about the provision of study effort and the distribution of numerical course averages in the presence of the thresholds that separate these discrete rewards. Surprisingly, all are rejected in our data. There is no evidence that exam performance is improved for those students that stand to gain the most from additional study.     

Transition as Development

Russia has been negotiating for accession to the WTO for some ten years, and there is still no prospect of an immediate conclusion to the process. The reasons for this are partly to be found in the international environment. In the past, the geo‐strategic concerns of the Western powers have created barriers to Russian integration into global trading structures. Even in the new, post‐September 11 environment, existing WTO members have continued to use the WTO accession process as a way of advancing their own commercial policies vis‐à‐vis Russia. But the main obstacles to speedy accession have been internal. While the Russian government as a whole is strongly in favour of WTO accession as a way of strengthening the market mechanism and reform processes within the country, significant elements within it are equally strongly in favour of high levels of protection for specific sectors, on national security and/or technological/infant industry grounds. While the Russian business community as a whole is divided over the merits of accession, the powerful manufacturing and banking lobbies are demanding levels of protection that would almost certainly be incompatible with accession. Russian views of WTO accession vary widely, within both government and the business community, and anyone who would lobby in favour of accession within Russia must bear this firmly in mind.     

Voting as Communicating

This paper develops a model where voters trade-off two different motiveswhen deciding how to vote: they care about current decision-making (theyare "strategic"), but they also care about communicating theirviews about their most-preferred candidate so as to influence futureelections, by influencing other voters' opinion and/or partypositioning. In effect, voters in this model are intermediate between"strategic" and "sincere" voters of conventionalmodels in elections with more than 2 candidates. This allows us to betterinvestigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems: our mainconclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoralsystems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication, e.g. by opting for 2-round systems rather than 1-round systems.     

Marx and Menger on value: as many similarities as differences

This paper argues that, as far as theories of value and moneyare concerned, Marx and Menger have more in common than hasbeen traditionally maintained. Each of them had his own abstractconcept of value, distinct from labour or utility and priorto prices. Moreover, both proposed theories of value form andprovided explanations of the origin of money. These conceptsand theories can hardly be found in the works of Smith and Ricardo,nor in those of Jevons and Walras, because they were primarilyconcerned with the determination of exchange ratios. Furthermore,Marx and Menger become more sharply divided owing to their similarities.They shared many questions to which they offered opposite answers.     

Privatization when the public firm is as efficient as private firms

The literature on mixed oligopoly shows that when production costs are quadratic the public firm is privatized if the competition in the product market is high enough. Similarly, when the public firm is less efficient than private firms and the marginal costs of production are constant, the government privatizes the public firm if its efficiency is low enough. In this paper we analyze this issue assuming that the public firm maximizes the weighted sum of consumer surplus, private profit and the profit of the public firm. If all firms have the same marginal cost of production we obtain that for some value of parameters the government does not privatize the public firm regardless of how many private firms are competing in the product market. We also obtain that the consumer surplus can be lower in the mixed oligopoly than in the private oligopoly.     

瑞典开展科技评估的实践及启示

本文对瑞典政府开展的多层次科技评估实践活动进行了系统梳理,重点介绍了瑞典在开展国家科技计划实施绩效评估、科技创新政策实施效果评估、科研机构运行情况评估、中小企业创新能力评估、国际科技合作评估等方面的典型案例,分析了这些评估活动的组织实施模式、主要评估结论及评估结果的应用等。最后,从四个方面总结了瑞典开展科技评估活动的经验与启示。     

Economics as mechanism: The mind as machine in Hayek's sensory order

InThe Sensory Order, Friedrich A. Hayek describes the human mind as an apparatus of classification that evolves through experience and that reaches decisions by modeling the alternative courses of action that are available to it. Hayek's mechanistic conception of mind argues aginst the possibility of central planning and against the cogency of any rule that denigrates subjective decision making by employers or other economic agents. As implied by Gödel's proof, no brain, human or mechanical, can ever be sufficiently complex to explain itself. There will therefore always be certain knowledge and rules that cannot be articulated to the satisfaction of a central planner or tribunal.     

The nurse as professnocrat

One of the greatest difficulties in being a nurse in the 1990s is maintaining excellent care in the face of economic constraints. This article explores how organizations (including hospitals), which originated as bureaucracies, need to change their format. Nurses can have great impact on organizations as they serve as "Professnocrats" who understand that professional goals and bureaucratic goals can be integrated in health care organizations of the future.     

Organizations as constitutional systems

Four theoretical approaches to the study of organizations that can be identified in the relevant literature are compared: Thegoal paradigm, theexchange paradigm, thenexus of contracts paradigm, and theconstitutional paradigm. It is argued that the latter provides the more fruitful theoretical perspective in that it reconciles an individualist methodology with an account of organisations as corporate actors, as units of collective action. I would like to thank Richard E. Wagner for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.     

Persuasion as a contest

We examine how the probability of persuading an audience depends on resources expended by contending parties as well as on other factors. We use a Bayesian approach whereby the audience makes inferences solely based on the evidence produced by the contestants. We find conditions that yield the well-known additive contest success function, including the logit function. We also find conditions that produce a generalized ??difference?? functional form. In all cases, there are three main determinants of audience choice: (i) the truth and other objective parameters of the environment; (ii) the biases of the audience, and (iii) the resources expended by the interested parties.     

Capabilities as causal powers

The author argues that Sen's capability approach is primarilya philosophical under-labouring exercise aimed at elaboratingcertain central economic categories, and that the philosophicaland methodological underpinnings of Sen's approach are radicallydifferent from those of contemporary welfare economics and mainstreameconomic practice. Sen's notion of ‘capabilities’as the potential functionings to achieve well-being is interpretedhere as a specification of the ontological category of ‘causalpower’, presupposing an open system conception of realitythat contrasts with much of contemporary economic practice.     

Corruption as a gamble

In the following model of corruption, a simple game is set up whose players are a government official granting a permit, conditional on a test, and a candidate requesting the permit. The game is solved under different assumptions as to the information sets of the players: perfect information, asymmetric information and imperfect information on both sides. In the latter case, after characterizing the solution and presenting some important comparative-statics results, the paper moves on to show the emergence of multiple equilibria in corruption, illustrating the interaction of corruption at different hierarchical levels of an administration.     

Economics as Detective Fiction

Almost all good economic analysis is structured like classical detective fiction. This relationship goes well beyond the obvious fact that both detective fiction and economic analysis involve puzzles. The economist's epistemology, presented in the form of scientific narratives, runs parallel to the puzzle-solving processes of the mastermind sleuth presented in the form of fictional narratives. The family resemblance between economic analysis and the classic whodunit becomes even more transparent by noticing another important characteristic they share: the concept of equilibrium. Examples chosen from recent economic literature bring the argument into sharper focus. In each instance, the solution to the puzzles that lie at the heart of their respective domains must be ingenious and surprising in order to be persuasive.