Special Interests and Technological Change

We study an OLG economy where productivity growth comes from two alternative sources: process innovation and learning-by-doing. There is a trade-off between the two in so far as frequent technological updates reduce the scope for learning on existing technologies. A conflict is shown to arise between the young and the old, because the former favour innovation while the latter prefer learning. We model the interaction between overlapping generations and policy makers as a dynamic common agency problem, where competing generations invest a certain amount of resources to lobby either for the maintenance of the current technology or the adoption of a new one. By focusing on truthful Markov perfect equilibria, we characterize the political equilibrium and show its dependence on the underlying demographic, technological and preference parameters.     

On the Composition of Committees

This article is concerned with the role of committees in collectivedecision making processes in a world where agents must be motivatedto collect information. Committees improve the quality of decisionmaking by providing information and by coordinating the collectionof information. We address two types of questions. First, howdoes the composition of a committee affect final decisions?Second, what is the optimal composition of a committee fromthe decision maker's point of view? As to the latter question,we show that the cost of information collection plays an importantrole. If this cost is low, then the preferences of the committeemembers should be aligned to those of the decision maker. Memberswith similar preferences as the decision maker collect the properpieces of information. Moreover, manipulation of informationdoes not occur if the preferences of the decision maker andthe members are consonant. If the cost of searching is high,then the committee should be composed of members with polarizedpreferences. Outliers have a strong incentive to search forinformation.     

Monetary Policy Committees: Individual and Collective Reputations

This paper looks at the incentives of individual members of a monetary policy committee to gain a reputation for inflationary toughness. I show a policy maker can have more or less incentive to build a reputation when part of a group. But, group policy making leads to higher expected social welfare. Not publishing individuals' votes, raises the temptation to inflate and lowers expected social welfare. If the culture or rules of a central bank puts more weight on senior policy makers, the incentive to build a reputation is greater, but expected social welfare may be higher or lower.     

Board Independence and Internal Committees in the BRICs

To be successful in global markets, companies from the emerging countries need the approval of foreign investors and other stakeholders. In this regard, Brazil, Russia, India, and China （BRIC） have progressively strengthened their corporate governance rules to help their companies overcome the competitors from the old industrialized countries. Directors＇ non-executive qualification, independence, and professional expertise represent basic requirements for effective corporate governance, so they should be carefully considered to guarantee a proper board composition and an adequate establishment of internal committees in listed companies. The paper intends to compare the legislative and regulatory frameworks adopted by the four countries; then it aims at answering to the following research questions by means of an empirical investigation： Have BRIC companies appointed non-executive and independent board members？ What do BRIC companies do in order to assure an effective participation of non-executive and independent board members to corporate governance activities？ Have BRIC companies established internal committees？ The research examines the appointment of non-executive directors and independent directors to the boards of 100 BRIC leading firms, as well as their involvement in internal committees focused on matters requiring motivated and impartial opinions. Although the laws and recommendations seem to favor a general convergence of corporate governance principles among the four BRIC and towards the international best practices, some differences and peculiarities emerge from a firm-level perspective. Indeed, the Indian and the Chinese companies analyzed appear more inclined than the Brazilian and the Russian ones to reassure their international stakeholders about board independence and effective committees.     

PACking a punch: Political Action Committees and corruption

Political Action Committees (PACs) are unique and prominent players in American politics. Yet, formal research on some aspects of PACs is lacking. Using US data over the period 1970 to 2009, this research demonstrates that the growth in PACs is positively associated with greater corruption. A 10% increase in the number of PACs per capita would increase corruption by about 8%. Upon disaggregation, corporate PACs, rather than labour PACs, are positively associated with corruption. The effects of economic prosperity, government size and population on US corruption are generally in line with the literature.     

Ranking Committees,Income Streams or Multisets

Multisets are collections of objects which may include several copies of the same object. They may represent bundles of goods, committees formed of members of several political parties, or income streams. In this paper we investigate the ways in which a linear order on a finite set A can be consistently extended to an order on the set of all multisets on A of some given cardinality k and when such an extension arises from a utility function on A. The condition of consistency that we introduce is a close relative of the de Finetti’s condition that defines comparative probability orders. We prove that, when A has three elements, any consistent linear order on multisets on A of cardinality k arises from a utility function and all such orders can be characterised by means of Farey fractions. This is not true when A has cardinality four or greater. It is proved that, unlike linear orders that can be represented by a utility function, any non-representable order on the set of all multisets of cardinality k cannot be extended to a consistent linear order on multisets of cardinality K for sufficiently large K. We also discuss the concept of risk aversion arising in this context.A significant part of this work was written when both authors were visiting professors at Bilkent University, Ankara. Slinko thanks Semih Koray and Mefharet Kocatepe for making this possible and Serguei Stepanov for discussion about Farey fractions. Sertel thanks the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES), Bures-sur-Yvette, France, for a couple of invitations, in 1999 and 2000, during which he had a chance to elaborate on some of the questions addressed in this paper. The authors thank students of The University of Auckland Irene Peng and Mark Lui who participated at an early stage of this project and Marston Conder for checking the result of Theorem 6 with MAGMA and correcting it. Murat Sertel was deceased (1942 – 2003).An erratum to this article is available at .     

Hierarchies Versus Committees: Communication and Information Acquisition in Organizations

In most firms workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that perspective. A key departure is that we consider a case where the authority relationship is defined only by the allocation of responsibility through contingent contracts. Within this framework, we show that the contractual arrangement that allocates responsibility asymmetrically often emerges as the optimal organizational form, which gives rise to the chain of command pertaining to hierarchical organizations.     

试论学生的学习兴趣和需求

兴趣和需求是人们行为的两大动力。应注重学生创造思维、学习兴趣和需求能力的培养,依据层次教育方案,确立确定培养目标,调动和激发学生的学习兴趣,培养其成为社会需要的人才。尊重他们的兴趣,给他们一个充满快乐的学习时光。     

有益品的性质与公共利益的识别

有益品(merit goods)作为市场缺陷的一种表现形式和政府干预经济的一个特殊理由,最初由马斯格雷夫(Musgrave)于1959年提出.尽管人们对有益品这个概念相对来说还比较陌生,但在实践中它却是一种最容易也最经常被指认的市场缺陷.有益品的界定取决于公共需求和公共利益的确认和识别方式.单纯用理论永远无法回答哪些是有益品,哪些事情符合公共利益,确切的答案只能通过公共决策程序才能获得.建立由社会公众广泛参与、能够充分表达他们的愿望和要求,并保证公众有效行使决策权力的民主决策制度对公共管理和公共财政来说是最为重要的.     

Committees with supermajority voting yield commitment with flexibility

A fundamental problem for government is how to combine commitment to certain policies with the flexibility required to adjust them when needed. Rogoff (1985) [Rogoff, K., 1985. The optimal degree of commitment to an intermediate monetary target, Q. J. Econ. 100(4) 1169–1189] showed that a way to strike the right balance is to appoint an optimally “conservative” policy-maker. In real life, however, policy-makers also have power over decisions where optimal plans are time-consistent, so delegating to a conservative person could be undesirable. A flexible delegation device can be found in a large committee of randomly appointed members voting over policy after observing a shock. When facing dynamic inconsistency, under a single-crossing property, there exists a supermajority rule that implements the population median's optimally conservative policy-maker with certainty. Another single-crossing property guarantees that if simple majority voting is used to select the voting rule that will govern policy choice, the supermajority preferred by the median is chosen. For problems where dynamic inconsistency vanishes, the committee will choose to make decisions by simple majority, implementing median outcomes. An application to monetary policy is developed. We show that the optimal supermajority is higher when dynamic inconsistency is more severe, when preferences are more homogeneous, and when the economy is less volatile.     

全球化中的利益分配

２０世纪８０年代以来，“全球化”作为一个全新的概念盛行起来，并要求我们运用新的方法去分析其内在的利益机制。国际货币基金组织第一副执行董事、经济学家费希尔认为：“全球化是在商品和服务跨国界交易以及国际资本流动数量和形式不断增加，在技术扩散广度和速度不断提高的基础上所形成的日益加深的各国在经济上的相互依赖。”经济全球化是一个可以使全球福利增进的“正和博弈”过程，但是全球化带来的利益能否在各国之间均衡分配，则取决于国际经济制度的安排。一、不同国际经济体制下的利益分配国际经济体制安排是一个涉及全球化利益…     

“既得利益集团”刍议

江泽民同志在“七一”重要讲话中明确指出：“所有党员干部必须真正代表人民掌好权、用好权，而绝不允许以权谋私，绝不允许形成既得利益集团。”这是总书记首次郑重提出：“绝不允许形成既得利益集团”的问题，具有重大的现实意义。笔者经过初步学习和思考，就“既得利益集团     

加强诚信建设 维护投资者利益——读《泥鸽靶》有感

<正>《泥鸽靶》,其英文原名为F．I．A．S．C．O．,是“大失败、大灾难”的意思,这一书名让人不寒而栗!掩罢书卷,我发现,书中所描述的内容也是怵目惊心的。虽然在中国证券市场中经历了十多年的风风雨雨,对国际金融市场发生的一些重大事件也通过一些渠道有所风闻,但本     

Russian Business Interests and the Enlarged European Union

The European Union is Russia's most important partner in foreign economic activities. With its eastward enlargement in 2004 the European Union has—not only in geographical terms—moved even closer to Russia. It should be expected that strong economic ties cause Russian business interests to influence related matters of foreign policy. This study therefore starts by identifying Russian business interests vis-a-vis the EU. Apart from those businesses already heavily involved in transactions with the EU, businesses with ambitious plans for future engagement and businesses which face heavy competition from EU companies are also included. In a second step these business interests are then analysed in detail. The specific interests of Russian companies are depicted to establish the points of conflict with EU positions. The article then describes how Russian companies lobby their government in order to gain support and how the Russian government reacts. The result is a more detailed assessment of the role of Russian business in Russia's policy towards the EU.     

战略性利益:影响"蒙特利尔协议"达成的要因及其机理

"蒙特利尔协议"在控制臭氧层破坏物质方面取得了显著的效果,对于其签约影响因素应该考虑到政治、经济等多方面的原因,签约背后的战略性利益是签约的重要驱动力。本文采用结构方程模型估计了潜在战略利益、大国作用等因素对协议签约延迟的影响,结果发现获得战略性利益的能力越强,签约延迟时间越短;与既有结论相似,结果还发现一个国家越有影响力、受协议的负面影响越小、民主程度和开放程度越高,其签约动机就越强,签约延迟时间也越短。     

论中国弱势群体的权益保障

弱势群体的概念虽然现代才出现,但这一群体早已存在,和人类的历史一样古老,对弱势群体的权力保障也有着悠久的历史。与中国历史上的社会保障制度相比,现代社会对弱势群体的保障无论在保障范围、保障制度等方面都有明显的进步,但与西方发达国家相比,还有一定的差距。     

Technological Choice In Voluntary Standards Committees: An Empirical Analysis

Vendors frequently compete to have their technology adopted as part of a voluntary consensus standard. In this paper we report the results of an empirical study of the factors that influence the choice of technologies in voluntary technical standards committees.

Participation in standards committees is viewed as an aspect of the product development process of corporations involved in markets where network externalities are present. The factors hypothesized to affect the technology decision are: the market power of the coalition sponsoring the technology, the installed base of the products containing the technology, the size of the firms that make up the coalition, the promotional activities of the sponsors (such as technical contributions submitted), the perceived superiority of the technology, and the political skills of the coalition.

These hypotheses were tested by collecting data concerning specific technical decisions that were made in several standards committees in the area of computer communications hardware. Two sided t-tests were used to test the hypotheses, and logit regression was used to infer the importance of each factor in predicting adoption or non-adoption of the technology. A factor analysis was also performed to gain further insight into the data.

The results suggest that the size of the firms in the coalition supporting a technology and the extent to which they support their position through written contributions are significant determinants of technological choice in the standards decisions studied. The market share of the firms in the coalition was found to be significant only for the buyers of compatible products, i.e., the monopsony power was significant, not the monopoly power. In addition, the technologies whose sponsors weighted market factors more highly than technical factors were more likely to be adopted in the standards decision studied. The proponents of both the adopted and non-adopted technologies were found to have equal belief in the overall technical superiority of their technical alternative, even after the decision. The installed base of a technology and process skills were not found to be significant predictors of the committee outcome.     

积极维护人民群众的文化利益

江泽民同志在广东考察工作时发表的讲话中提出了“三个代表”的重要思想，并且明确指出：因为我们党是代表最广大人民群众的根本利益的，所以全党同志的一切工作都是全心全意为人民服务的，都是为了实现好、发展好和维护好人民的利益。文化工作是党的工作中不可缺少的一部分，