LEARNING MATTERS: REAPPRAISING OBJECT ALLOCATION RULES WHEN AGENTS STRATEGICALLY INVESTIGATE

Individuals form preferences through search, interviews, discussion, and investigation. In a stylized object allocation model, we characterize the equilibrium learning strategies induced by different allocation rules and trace their welfare consequences. Our analysis reveals that top trading cycles rules dominate serial priority rules under inequality‐averse measures of social welfare.     

Networked Assemblages and Geopolitical Media: Governance,Infrastructure and Sites in BBC Radio

ABSTRACT

The development of radio as a communication and broadcasting technology has been vital to popular, formal and practical geopolitics. This paper contributes to the nascent literature on assemblage thought in geopolitics by considering radio as a historical iteration of “the media”. Through this dialogue, it is suggested that British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio is both a material and discursive assemblage, operating at multiple scales, sites and intensities of governance. The paper argues that radio cannot be seen simply as a vehicle for producing popular geopolitical imaginaries, nor as a neutral military or cultural diplomatic tool. Contributing to the use of assemblage and actor–network thought in historical-popular geopolitics, the paper begins by articulating the benefits of certain elements of these theoretical registers to the sub-field in general, before moving onto a series of empirical fragments from the archive to illustrate these abstractions in a more concrete manner. First, it does so by considering the early governance and regulation of radio in the 1920s, then the forces producing the BBC’s Middle Eastern Relay network during the late 1960s. The paper concludes with a further call to take materiality seriously, particularly in future popular geopolitical research dealing with media networks.     

Unemployment and the business cycle in a small open economy: G.M.M. estimation and testing with French data

What is a relevant model for the European business cycle? In this paper, the empirical performances of three models are compared: a canonical Walrasian R.B.C. framework, its extension to the case of a small open economy, and a version of this model with search and wage bargaining on the labor market. Structural parameters of the models are estimated using G.M.M. and their abilities to reproduce the French business cycle, taken as representative of the European business cycle, are tested. Only the small open economy with unemployment is able to generate theoretical moments that match their empirical counterparts.     

Intelligent knowledge based systems (IKBS): organisational implications

Many factors other than technology can influence the forms of work organisation at several key stages during the process of change. This article discusses developments in the design of intelligent knowledge-based systems (IKBS) and argues that these new forms of computerisation will undermine the position of a number of management functions in the enterprise.     

Immigration,Labour Markets and Employment Relations: Problems and Prospects

In this review essay, I argue that immigration presents employment researchers with a promising strategic research site because it raises a number of theoretically significant problems with mainstream economic approaches to labour and labour markets. Despite the tendency to view economic migrants as homo economicus personified, I argue that immigration brings the institutional nature of labour markets into sharp relief as it exposes, among other things, the influence of the state, processes of labour market segmentation, and the role of trade union policy and practice. Having identified a number of empirical anomalies that contradict neoclassical economic theory, I proceed to sketch out three areas where a more institutionally oriented approach should prove more fruitful.