Property Markets At Sea

Explotation of seabed resources will be inefficient unless markets are established in seabed property rights. Professor Denman draws an implicit parallel between the Enclosure Movement which produced rapid improvements in agricultural efficiency, and privatising the ocean floor, and offers specific proposals for its implementation.     

Pricing Sydney water*

The paper estimates an aggregate daily water demand for Sydney using rainfall, temperature, and price data from 2001 to 2005, and a dummy variable to account for reductions in demand following the introduction of water restrictions in October 2003. Analyses based on the estimated price elasticity, and also values one and two standard errors above and below this estimate, are used to model the effects of different pricing and water supply scenarios. The simulations indicate that without a fundamental change in water policy (pricing and supply) Sydney faces the possibility of critical water shortages in the short- to medium-term should there be a continuation of low rainfall events.     

Zur Qualität der Medienkontrolle: Ergebnisse einer Befragung deutscher Rundfunk- und Medienräte

This article presents the results of a survey among German media supervisors (members of supervising boards in public broadcasting stations and state media institutions). Given the increasing commercialization and internationalization of television, the supervising boards play a crucial part in assessing the quality of programs. From among 940 German supervisors, 364 took part in the survey, which covered the individual role conceptions of respondents as well as their attitudes towards quality criteria for television. Results suggest that both the supervisors’ amount of television use and the types of programs they prefer is clearly different from patterns in the population. This, along with the observation that supervisors often criticize what they saw privately, suggests (given the diversity of programs) that too much might be expected of them. Media supervisors do heed quality criteria in their work, but these probably do not correspond to other groups’ criteria, and especially not to the general population’s. To conclude, suggestions are discussed to improve the system of supervising programs by important social groups.     

Strategic Interaction in a Repeated Game: Evidence from NCAA Football Recruiting

We analyze decisions to comply or cheat on NCAA recruiting regulations in the context of repeated interactions. Teams possess private information about resources devoted to football programs, recruiting effort made by rival programs, and rival program behavior. We test for evidence that the behavior of NCAA Division IA football programs conforms to predictions from repeated game theoretic models using panel data from IA football over the period 1978–2005. We find anecdotal and empirical support for strategic interaction. The presence of in-conference rivals under NCAA sanctions increases the probability of a team being placed under future sanctions.