The core of some location games

An important problem in Location Theory is that of assigning plants to locations in an optimal manner. In the context of this problem, recognizing interplant transportation costs, Koopmans and Beckmann (1957) introduced the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). It is shown in this paper that when the QAP is formulated as a cooperative location game, its core may be empty. By contrast, the core of the game corresponding to thelinear assignment problem (where transportation costs are disregarded) is assured to be non-empty. Some conditions under which the core is non-empty are discussed.I am grateful to two anonymous referees of this journal for their comments.     

For some mothers more than others

We estimate the effect of family size on female labour supply using data from Poland and instrumenting for family size with twinning at first and second birth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to causally address this relationship in a post‐communist country. We identify the average causal effect of an additional child on mother's employment to be ?7.0 pp, but we do not find significant effects of additional children on female employment among families with two or more children. Furthermore, we identify a positive bias of OLS in the estimates among highly educated mothers and those from younger cohorts.     

Notes on some inequalities in economics

Summary. Inequalities created by relating gauge (distance) functions and their dual support functions have been used in economics and operations research/management science to measure efficiency and productivity. The most familiar example is the Farrell (1957) measure of cost efficiency and its decomposition into technical and allocative components, which can be shown to be an application of the Mahler (1939) inequalities, although Farrell was probably unaware of the connection. In this short paper we add to this literature by providing explicit relationships between distance functions and support functions to form five different inequalities. These inequalities are derived from three support functions: the cost function, the revenue function and the profit function, and three gauge (distance) functions: the input distance function, the output distance function and the directional (technology) distance function.     

Adaptive control of some producer-producer externalties

This paper takes advantage of the well-known result that joint-profit maximization (merger) will yield the optimal quantity of a producer-producer externality to propose a simple real-time algorithm for setting a corrective tax in the case in which firms do not know their profit functions whence the information required to compute the solution directly cannot be renewed by the tax authority. The behaviour of actual profits is sufficient information. Incentive for honest reporting are proposed, and the necessary technological assumptions examined.     

信用证欺诈及其防范与处理

中国实行对外开放政策以来,国内外贸公司进行的国际贸易业务也呈迅速增长之势。因此,对国际贸易支付方式——信用证也就有了较多的接触。因为信用证在商业信用中又增加了银行信用作担保,所以贸易双方都愿意采用这种结算方式。目前,信用证是国际贸易中最广泛使用的支付手段。它也是国际贸易得以顺利、高效进行的关键因素之一。然而,由于信用证是针对单证文件而非实际货物,而且信用证本身及其项下的单据文件皆有可能被一方恶意伪造、变造或用其他非法方式取得,从而骗得对方财物,使对方遭受严重损失,甚至破产。从国际贸易的实践来看,信用证欺诈…     

Beyond welfare economics: some methodological issues

When one wishes to formulate, evaluate and implement public policies, the existence of a plurality of social actors, with interest in the policy being assessed, generates a conflictual situation. How such a conflict should be dealt with? This paper defends the thesis articulated in the following points: (1) Different metrics are linked to different objectives and values. To use only one measurement unit (on the grounds of the so-called commensurability principle) for incorporating a plurality of dimensions, objectives and values, implies reductionism necessarily. (2) Point (1) can be proven as a matter of formal logic by drawing on the work of Geach about moral philosophy. This theoretical demonstration is an original contribution of this article. Moreover, here the distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives is formalised and definitions are provided. Predicative adjectives are further distinguished into the new categories of absolute and relative ones. The new concepts of set commensurability and rod commensurability are introduced too. (3) Weak comparability of values, which is grounded on incommensurability, is proposed as the main methodological foundation of well-being evaluation. Incommensurability does not imply incomparability; on the contrary incommensurability is the only possible way to compare societal options under a plurality of policy objectives. Weak comparability can be implemented by using multicriteria evaluation, which is a formal framework for applied consequentialism under incommensurability.     

The concept of routines: some clarifications

The concept of an ‘organisational routine’ is centralto the evolutionary theory of the firm. However, the conceptitself is still unclear. There is not much consensus in theliterature regarding its dimensions, its characteristics andits functions. Despite increasing use of the concept, not muchconceptual progress has been made in recent years, as remarkedby several of the leading writers on the topic. The objectiveof this paper is to contribute to further theoretical developmentof the concept of ‘organisational routine’, andto elaborate the research agenda on organisational routines.Both of these measures contribute to clarifying the conceptand enabling its application in empirical research in the socialsciences, thereby unlocking its potential for understandingorganisations and organisational change. Several problems forconceptual progress are identified. Implications for the conceptualisationof ‘organisational routines’, and for the researchagenda on organisational routines are drawn.     

On some topological properties of stable measures

Summary The paper shows that the set of stable probability measures and the set of Rational Beliefs relative to a given stationary measure are closed in the strong topology, but not closed in the topology of weak convergence. However, subsets of the set of stable probability measures which are characterized by uniformity of convergence of the empirical distribution are closed in the topology of weak convergence. It is demonstrated that such subsets exist. In particular, there is an increasing sequence of sets of SIDS measures who's union is the set of all SIDS measures generated by a particular system and such that each subset consists of stable measures. The uniformity requirement has a natural interpretation in terms of plausibility of Rational Beliefs.ncial support from The Carlsberg Foundation, The University of Copenhagen, and Danish Social Science Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to thank Trinidad Casasus, Mordecai Kurz, and Tiefeng Jiang for many useful suggestions for improving the paper, and Karl Vind for helpful discussions about parts of it.