Future information systems for road transport: A Delphi panel-derived scenario

Modern information and microelectronic technology can be used to improve road traffic. The aim of this study is to create scenarios on how new information systems for improved road traffic can evolve. What are the driving forces? Who can act? Who can benefit? What are the social impacts?Through the use of a Delphi panel of professionals, researchers, and informed generalists, we have gathered impulses for the scenarios on how information technology, communication means, and control systems can reshape future road traffic. The issue studied is how this “Road Transport Informatics” (RTI) will evolve.     

Afterword on the Five-Year Outlook: Problems and promises

The editors offer a synthesis that reflects the motivations and concerns that underlie this volume and present “some reasonably tempered hopes and future prospects”. Among the former, they discuss “political/ institutional issues” impinging on the Outlook—its purpose, production, users, and feedback—as well as “technical/intellectual” ones. Among the latter, they note that for Outlook reports beyond the second, current signals are that the science policy community will be involved more substantially, and that contributions in general will be decentralized. They foresee the Outlook evolving into a forum for discussion and advocacy of future science-technology priorities.     

An elephantine theory of depressions

In microeconomics a theory is thought to be, if not inadequate, then incomplete unless it can be interpreted as “telling a story.” Beavers and deers, perpetual plants, aging wine—these and other homely examples play a larger role in our assessment of the validity of theories than economists might want to admit. If we cannot find a plausible story, then the theory itself is often suspect. This criterion may be applied to macroeconomics too…     

A quasi-competitive price basis for intersystem comparisons of economic structure and performance

The use of endogenously determined product and factor prices—to be termed “eigenprices”—is proposed for the comparative evaluation of structural characteristics and crucial performance criteria across different systems. The eigenprices are algebraically defined and a methodology for their computation is proposed. A special appendix tests the computability of these prices and their derivatives, and offers comparative orders of magnitude for a variety of countries.     

On Forecasting Discontinuities

Too much has been written about forecasting trends via “envelope curves.” To plot a straight line on log-paper is a no-brainer. The special phenomenology of phase changes, catastrophes, or “crashes,” and their key evolutionary role is the subject of this article. There is no unique way of forecasting such events, but one indicator is an apparent inconsistency between two or more extrapolations with each other. Alternatively, a catastrophe may be signalled when a trend extrapolation encounters a natural limit. A number of possible discontinuity scenarios are sketched, although overall, the article laments the lack of theorization in forecasting disconuities.     

Alberta and the 200-year present

This article was written as background for a presentation to the conference “Reflections on Caring,” held in Edmonton, Alberta, from April 28 to May 1, 1986, under the auspices of Edmonton Catholic School Services. In it, I tried to summarize what seemed to me the more important long-term influences on Alberta's future in general and of one of its social institutions in particular. Some might be surprised by the relatively little space allocated to energy markets, given Alberta's extreme dependence on the petroleum industry. The deemphasis of this subject was deliberate and was driven by a desire to talk about values, rather than economics, to an audience for whom values are the more important subject. I also chose the emphasis on values because in our day and age they are so seldom discussed. We rely in our discussions of public policy so much on the “value- free” social sciences that we have quite lost sight of the crucial role that values play in determining what are public issues and how they should be discussed and addressed. More particularly, we have lost sight of the value set that underlies the sciences, social and otherwise, and in consequence we have lost our ability to be discriminating in our choice of subjects to which the sciences are capable of rendering a useful answer. I would argue that that value set is no longer a reliable guide for the future—that it identifies the wrong issues and cannot deal with the real ones even if it could identify them. In one sense, the article is an attempt to justify that viewpoint, although I did not set out to write the article with that in mind.     

Explaining the economic trajectories of civilizations: The systemic approach

A civilization constitutes a durable social system of complementary traits. Some of the complementarities of any given civilization are between elements of “material” life and ones commonly treated as integral to “culture.” Identifying the mechanisms responsible for a civilization's observed trajectory involves, therefore, causal relationships that cross the often-postulated “cultural–material” divide. Complementarities make it difficult to transplant institutions across civilizations on a piecemeal basis. They imply that reforms designed to jump-start an economy will fail unless they are comprehensive. Civilizational analysis can benefit, therefore, from attention to institutional complementarities, including ones involving both cultural and material variables.     

Strategic planning in public R&D organizations for agribusiness: Brazil and the United States of America

There is increasing evidence that public organizations dedicated exclusively to research and development (R&D) in agribusiness need systematic management tools to incorporate the uncertainties and complexities of technological and nontechnological factors of external environments in its long-term strategic plans. The major issues are: “What will be the agribusiness science and technology (S&T) needs be in the future?” “How to prepare in order to meet these needs?” Both Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, Embrapa), attached to the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have developed a comprehensive strategic and operational planning process in order to answer these key questions in the 1990s. The main objective of this article is to present a comparative and preliminary analysis of concepts, methodologies, and processes utilized, and some results obtained by these public organizations.     

Contracts and externalities: How things fall apart

A single principal interacts with several agents, offering them contracts. The crucial assumption of this paper is that the outside-option payoffs of the agents depend positively on how many uncontracted or “free” agents there are. We study how such a principal, unwelcome though he may be, approaches the problem of contract provision to agents when coordination failure among the latter group is explicitly ruled out. Two variants are considered. When the principal cannot re-approach agents, there is a unique equilibrium, in which contract provision is split up into two phases. In phase 1, simultaneous offers at good (though varying) terms are made to a number of agents. In phase 2, offers must be made sequentially, and their values are “discontinuously” lower: they are close to the very lowest of all the outside options. When the principal can repeatedly approach the same agent, there is a multiplicity of equilibria. In some of these, the agents have the power to force delay. They can hold off the principal's overtures temporarily, but they must succumb in finite time. In both models, despite being able to coordinate their actions, agents cannot resist an “invasion” by the principal and hold to their best payoff. It is in this sense that “things [eventually] fall apart”.     

A model of “coupled” technology transfer : A logistic curve approach

This article presents a mathematical model relating to the technology transfer problem. The origin of the problem stems from the existing trade-offs between the strategies of “technological progressiveness” and “static efficiency” employed by firms or countries defined as “leaders” and “followers,” respectively. The formulation of the model is based on the assumption that the technological development of a firm or a country follows a logistic growth curve when related to a specific technology. During the process of a “coupled” technology transfer, the development of the follower changes and its behavior is described by a first order nonhomogenous deferential equation. Different scenarios of the “coupled” technology transfer between the leader and the follower are being discussed.     

Abreu–Matsushima Mechanisms: Experimental Evidence

Abreu–Matsushima mechanisms can be applied to a broad class of games to induce any desired outcome as the unique rationalizable outcome. We conduct experiments investigating the performance of such mechanisms in two simple coordination games. In these games one pure-strategy equilibrium is “focal”; we assess the efficacy of Abreu–Matsushima mechanisms for implementing the other pure-strategy equilibrium outcome. Abreu–Matsushima mechanisms induce some choices consistent with the desired outcome, but more choices reflect the focal outcome. Moreover, “strengthening” the mechanism has a perverse effect when the desired outcome is a Pareto-dominated risk-dominated equilibrium.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C7.     

Strongly stable networks

We analyze the formation of networks among individuals. In particular, we examine the existence of networks that are stable against changes in links by any coalition of individuals. We show that to investigate the existence of such strongly stable networks one can restrict focus on a component-wise egalitarian allocation of value. We show that when such strongly stable networks exist they coincide with the set of efficient networks (those maximizing the total productive value). We show that the existence of strongly stable networks is equivalent to core existence in a derived cooperative game and use that result to characterize the class of value functions for which there exist strongly stable networks via a “top convexity” condition on the value function on networks. We also consider a variation on strong stability where players can make side payments, and examine situations where value functions may be non-anonymous—depending on player labels.     

Don’t let your robots grow up to be traders: Artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and asset-market bubbles

Researchers who have examined markets populated by “robot traders” have claimed that the high level of allocative efficiency observed in experimental markets is driven largely by the “intelligence” implicit in the rules of the market. Furthermore, they view the ability of agents (artificial or human) to process information and make rational decisions as unnecessary for the efficient operation of markets. This paper presents a new series of market experiments that show that markets populated with standard robot traders are no longer efficient if time is a meaningful element, as it is in all asset markets. While simple two-season markets with human subjects reliably converge to an efficient equilibrium, markets with minimally intelligent robot traders fail to attain this equilibrium. Instead, these markets overshoot the equilibrium and then crash below it. In addition to firmly establishing the role of trader intelligence in asset-market equilibrium, these experiments also provide insights into why bubbles and crashes are consistently observed in many asset-market laboratory experiments using human subjects.     

Control of SO2 emissions from power plants: A case of induced technological innovation in the U.S.

This paper investigates how the details of government actions induce innovation—the overlapping activities of invention, adoption and diffusion, and learning by doing—in “environmental technology,” products and processes that either control pollutant emissions or prevent emissions altogether. It applies multiple quantitative and qualitative measures of innovation to a case subject to several “technology-push” and “demand-pull” instruments: sulfur dioxide control technology for power plants. The study employs analyses of public R&D funding, patents, expert interviews, learning curves, conference proceedings, and experience curves. Results indicate that: regulation and the anticipation of regulation stimulate invention; technology-push instruments appear to be less effective at prompting invention than demand-pull instruments; and regulatory stringency focuses inventive activity along certain technology pathways. Increased diffusion of the technology results in significant and predictable operating cost reductions in existing systems, as well as notable efficiency improvements and capital cost reductions in new systems. Government plays an important role in fostering knowledge transfer via technical conferences, as well as affecting the pattern of collaborative relationships within the technical research community via regulatory changes that affect the market for the technology. Finally, the case provides little evidence for the claim that cap-and-trade instruments induce innovation more effectively than other instruments.     

Subjective conditional probability modelling

Cross-impact analysis is a technique for investigating the effect of interaction of events in future oriented studies. A fundamental difficulty with cross-impact analysis is to determine what respondents mean when they answer the “conditional probability” questions normally posed. This paper offers a heuristic alternative to traditional cross-impact analysis which is applicable to cross-impact situations where the object is to generate scenarios for decision making.     

Will low technology products disappear?: The hidden innovation processes in low technology industries

Political discussions and analyses have usually been devoted to an understanding of the development of high technology products, although low technology products have dominated the industrial structure of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The important role of low technology products in these countries raises the question of whether we can observe a technological paradox in the industrial structure of the more advanced nations, the dominant role of this sector in spite of its competitive disadvantages because of high wages. Using the Danish packaging industry as an example, a central thesis in the article is that innovation processes are important in low technology industries. They are also often an integrated part of the marketing and production functions of the firm. The innovation processes in the low technology industries are therefore too complex for traditional R&D analyses to handle. The article points out that—especially in small firms—the “practical man” and his “tacit knowledge” play a very central role in both product and process development, and that low technology, even in the future, will play a central role in the industrial structure of the OECD countries.     

Concatenate coordination and mutual coordination

We tell of the evolving meaning of the term coordination as used by economists. The paper is based on systematic electronic searches (on “coord,” etc.) of major works and leading journals. The term coordination first emerged in professional economics around 1880, to describe the directed productive concatenation of factors or activities within a firm. Also, transportation economists used the term to describe the concatenation of routes and trips of a transportation system. These usages represent what we term concatenate coordination. The next major development came in the 1930s from several LSE economists (Hayek, Plant, Hutt, and Coase), who extended that concept beyond the eye of any actual coordinator. That is, they wrote of the concatenate coordination of a system of polycentric or spontaneous activities. These various applications of concatenate coordination prevailed until the next major development, namely, Thomas Schelling and game models. Here coordination referred to a mutual meshing of actions. Game theorists developed crisp ideas of coordination games (like “battle of the sexes”), coordination equilibria, convention, and path dependence. This “coordination” was not a refashioning, but rather a distinct concept, one we distinguish as mutual coordination. As game models became more familiar to economists, it was mutual coordination that economists increasingly had in mind when they spoke of “coordination.” Economists switched, so to speak, to a new semantic equilibrium. Now, mutual coordination overshadows the older notion of concatenate coordination. The two senses of coordination are conceptually distinct and correspond neatly to the two dictionary definitions of the verb to coordinate. Both are crucial to economics. We suggest that distinguishing between the two senses can help to clarify “coordination” talk. Also, compared to talk of “efficiency” and “optimality,” concatenate coordination allows for a richer, more humanistic, and more openly aesthetic discussion of social affairs. The narrative is backed up by Excel worksheets that report on systematic content searches of the writings of economics using the worldwide web and, using JSTOR, of Quarterly Journal of Economics, Economic Journal, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, and Economica.