‘Territorial deregulation’: local authorities at risk from technical networks

Technical networks (transport, telecommunications, energy etc.) possess paradoxical virtues. They produce ‘structuring effects’ on space, obtaining comparative advantages for the places they serve. But they are ubiquitous factors which also enable a homogenization of space. The myths of deterritorialization and dual space are refuted by empirical analyses of the interaction between networks and territories. Networks ‘format’ market areas and political territories. They create matrixes which until now were controlled by the public powers. Linked to current transformations – globalization, deregulation – the present mode of development of the technical macro‐systems brings about a telescoping of geographical scales which is having an adverse effect on the historic compromise between networks and territories. The boundaries of traditional political space have become obsolete and an economic rationale in the form of an extension of the technical networks predominates. In order to rediscover their policy‐making capacity, local authorities must pay more attention to controlling the occupation of public space as well as to the design and organization of the networks’ hubs. They should encourage the emergence of users as players in the regulation of public utilities so that debates on universal service and territorial equality may be activated. Les réseaux techniques (transport, télécommunication, énergie etc.) sont parés de vertus paradoxales. Ils produiraient des ‘effets structurants’ sur l’espace, procurant des avantages comparatifs aux lieux desservis. Mais, facteurs d’ubiquité, ils permettraient aussi une homogénéisation de l’espace. Ces mythes de la déterritorialisation et de la dualisation de l’espace sont réfutés par les analyses empiriques des interactions entre réseaux et territoires. Les réseaux ‘formatent’ des aires de marché et des territoires politiques; ils fabriquent des métriques, dont les pouvoirs publics avaient jusquà présent la maîtrise. Liées aux transformations en cours – globalisation, dérégulation – le mode de développement actuel des macro‐systèmes techniques entraîne un télescopage des échelles géographiques qui met à mal le compromis historique entre réseaux et territoires. Il y a obsolescence des frontières des espaces politiques traditionnels et prédominance de la logique économique dans l’extension des réseaux techniques. Afin de retrouver des capacités d’action, les collectivités locales doivent porter plus d’attention au contrôle de l’occupation de l’espace public ainsi qu’à la conception et à l’organisation des noeuds de réseau. Elles ont aussi à favoriser l’émergence des usagers comme acteurs de la régulation des services en réseau, afin que soient activés les débats sur le service universel et sur l’équité territoriale.     

Performance evaluation of National Football League teams

Most recent empirical analyses of production in the sports economic literature have focused on Major League Baseball. This paper extends that literature by analysing football production in the National Football League (NFL). Using the Poisson regression model, we measure the performance of NFL teams and head coaches. The measure is based on a production process where player skills are converted into games won. The evidence reveals that quality coaching is an important component in the production process. It appears that efficient coaching can account for an additional three to four victories in a given season. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Becoming A Leader In A Complex Organization

For a new leader, the process of entering and establishing a position of leadership in a complex organization presents a major challenge. This challenge seems particularly acute when authority, goals and technology are ambiguous, as in many professional service organizations. In this paper, we integrate ideas from the literature on socialization and role theory as well as that on executive succession processes to view new leader integration as a mutual adjustment process between two trajectories – that of the organization and that of the new leader. It is argued that this may lead to four possible types of integration outcomes: assimilation, transformation, accommodation and parallelism. Drawing on a case study of a large hospital, the paper identifies several mechanisms that can be mobilized by the new leader to enhance his or her room for manœuvre as the integration process evolves. The mechanisms can be classified as collaborative or affirmative, with each type having different risks and advantages. The case analysis further reveals that leader integration processes may be differentiated between different activity domains, dynamic over time (as the use of one type of integration approach alters the potential for another later), and interactive across different activity domains (as events in one part of the organization have consequences for those occurring in another).     

The economics of nonprofit organisations' governance

We determine theoretically when we can expect agency problems amenable to shirking agents to arise in nonprofit organisations and derive the conditions for governance measures to remedy these. Agents' private benefits of shirking need to be considered combined with the effect of their efforts on the probabilities of being successful in fundraising and production. If this effect is large, agency problems can more easily be avoided. Sufficient conditions for governance measures to reduce agency problems are derived. The empirical literature fits a number of the results derived and shows important gaps, especially w.r.t. the role of success probabilities.     

Giving Stated Preference Respondents “Time to Think”: Results From Four Countries

Previous studies have found that contingent valuation (CV) respondents who are given overnight to reflect on a CV scenario have 30–40% lower average willingness-to-pay (WTP) than respondents who are interviewed in a single session. This “time to think” (TTT) effect could explain much of the gap between real and hypothetical WTP observed in experimental studies. Yet giving time to think is still rare in binary or multinomial discrete choice studies. We review the literature on increasing survey respondents’ opportunities to reflect on their answers and synthesize results from parallel TTT studies on private vaccine demand in four countries. Across all four countries, we find robust and consistent evidence from both raw data and multivariate models for a TTT effect: giving respondents overnight to think reduced the probability that a respondent said he or she would buy the hypothetical vaccines. Average WTP fell approximately 40%. Respondents with time to think were also more certain of their answers, and a majority said they used the opportunity to consult with their spouse or family. We conclude with a discussion of why researchers might be hesitant to adopt the TTT methodology.     

Optimal financial investments for non-concave utility functions

We prove a formula for the computation of optimal financial investments in an expected utility framework with arbitrary (not necessarily concave) utility functions. This extends classical results on optimal financial investments for strictly concave utility functions and is of importance particularly for applications of prospect theory where the utility function has a convex-concave shape.     

Mergers in asymmetric Stackelberg markets

It is well known that the profitability of horizontal mergers with quantity competition is scarce. However, in an asymmetric Stackelberg market we obtain that some mergers are profitable. Our main result is that mergers among followers become profitable when the followers are inefficient enough. In this case, leaders reduce their output when followers merge and this reduction renders the merger profitable. This merger increases price and welfare is reduced.      

Investment and technological choice in a right-to-manage model

We analyze the interactions between investment and local wage bargaining in a putty-clay model where the investment decision commits the firm to a particular capital intensity. This technological precommitment is used strategically in order to manipulate the bargaining outcome. We show that this strategic behavior induces a nonmonotonic relationship between the capital and labor demands of the firm and most of its environmental parameters (e.g., the bargaining power of the union, its minimum wage requirement, the capital cost). The results we obtain in our putty-clay framework thus contradict several conclusions of the standard literature on wage bargaining and investment.     

An Evolutionary Approach to Financial Innovation

The purpose of this paper is to explain why some markets for financial products take off while others vanish as soon as they have emerged. To this end, we model an infinite sequence of CAPM-economies in which financial products can be used for insurance purposes. Agents' participation in these financial products, however, is restricted. Consecutive stage economies are linked by a mapping ('transition function") which determines the next period's participation structure from the preceding period's participation. The transition function generates a dynamic process of market participation which is driven by the percentage of informed traders and the rate at which a new asset is adopted. We then analyse the evolutionary stability of stationary equilibria. In accordance with the empirical literature on financial innovation, it is obtained that the success of a financial innovation, a mutation, depends on a sufficiently high trading volume, marketing, and new and differentiated hedging opportunities. In particular, a set of complete markets forming a stationary equilibrium is robust with respect to any further financial innovation while this is not necessarily true for a set of incomplete markets.
"There is no generally accepted theory of financial innovation, but some broad generalizations of the innovation process are possible. What matters is not the invention of a financial product or process (which is often obscure) but its diffusion through the market environment".
Ted Padolski (1987) in: The New Palgrave on Money and Finance: Financial
Innovation and Money Supply (p. 68)