Review article: The Hayekian research programme

Andrew Gamble: Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty , London, Polity Press, £12.95. 1996, pp. xxi + 221
Jeremy Shearmur; Hayek and After , London, Routledge, £45, 1996, pp.x +257     

Year Twelve Economics Examination: Five Answers to Macroeconomic Questions

In preparing these essays, I sat before a keyboard on a single (long) day, and made a selection under examination conditions of the essays I would prepare, then allocated some 45 minutes each, checking only the word count as I went, aiming for about 1000 words for each essay. I had no notes, texts, tables or other information with me, but I did take breaks between essays. I have done no editing for expression, dates or data since my time expired, but I have added (most of the) endnotes since then, and fixed some terrible typing errors caused by the pressures to which most candidates should easily be able to relate. I tried to write as an advanced teenager with good knowledge of the subject. The essays were selected not merely to maximise my 'marks' in any sense, but to cover a wide range of macroeconomic principles and their application to Australia.     

What's wrong with executive compensation? A roundtable moderated by Charles Elson

The value that many superpaid CEO superstars supposedly created has largely disappeared, and the likelihood that it will be recovered anytime soon seems remote. On top of that, a good number of top executives treated their companies like ATMs, awarding themselves millions of dollars in corporate perks. It's hard to dispute the idea that executives were corrupted by the sums of money dangled in front of them. What's wrong with executive compensation, and what can we do about it? HBR and the University of Delaware's Center for Corporate Governance convened a round-table of compensation experts last October on the university's campus in Newark, Delaware. The 12 panelists, from CEOs to investors, from the professionals who advise them to a chief justice who rules on their disputes, provided an extraordinary diversity of viewpoints. The panelist began by debating ways to align the interests of the senior executives with the long-term interests of the company-weighing the relative benefits of stock options versus stock grants, for instance. But the discussion expanded to cover broader questions of corporate governance and company values. "The main reason compensation increases every year is that most boards want their CEO to be in the top half of the CEO peer group," said Ed Woolard,Jr., a former CEO of DuPont. And compensation lawyer Joe Bachelder pointed out the danger of structuring pay in such a way that it dampens risk taking among executives. It was a lively and wide-ranging discussion of one business's most pressing issues.     

Organizational Structures and Exchange Processes

Formal organizations have a division of labor and some form of co-ordination. This paper explores how these social structures could be generated by an exchange process that governs work flow through an organization. Specifically, the exchange process controls how work tasks are assigned and carried out, and how members receive rewards for participating in a work group of the organization. A discrete-event simulation model is used to explore how the exchange process generates division of labor and co-ordination networks. The model contains members, called bureaucrats, with two kinds of skills: skill at referring work to others; and skill in completing work tasks. Both kinds of skills are distributed differentially across bureaucrats. Two types of rational exchange are explored: independent exchange and pooled exchange. For independent exchange, rewards go the bureaucrat who completes the task; in pooled exchange rewards are shared with the bureaucrat who referred the task. Both exchange processes generate a division of labor in a work group, with pooled exchange exhibiting the most pronounced division of labor. Also, pooled exchange leads to more efficient processing of work than independent exchange.     

ARE SERVICES INCOME-ELASTIC? SOME NEW EVIDENCE

The hypothesis that the demand for services is income-elastic tended to find support in early empirical work. Recent studies however, adopting improved methodologies and better international data (based on PPP exchange rates), have challenged this conventional wisdom. Using an updated, disaggregated dataset covering 60 countries in 1980 this paper re-estimates income and price elasticities of demand for services. It rejects the income-elastic argument overall but confirms a wide range of income elasticity estimates (above and below unity) across different types of services. Estimates are also shown to be sensitive to the a priori model of service demand.     

Cultural dynamics in the diffusion of informatics

The diffusion of informatics, particularly of artificial intelligence devices, could produce sociocultural effects unlike those accompanying the introduction of other revolutionary technologies. A particular philosophy is associated with the computerization of society-yet this is appropriate only as a technical approach to communication and information processing problems and offers little in broadening the intellectual dimensions of man. To enhance human potential in both mental and intellectual senses and to reduce the dangers of inter- and intracultural conflict, an intellectique (connecting epistemology to informatics) is proposed to give us informatic tools that would allow the expression of cultural and personal differences.