Forward exchange,short term capital flows and monetary policy: A comment

Summary In this comment it is argued that the theoretical explanation of Coulbois and Prissert of the functioning of the forward exchange market (the cambist theory) is nothing but a simplified version of the interest parity theory, because in their theory the horizontal arbitrage function implicitly plays a dominant role.Further some critical remarks are made concerning the role of non-bank arbitrages and the influence of interest arbitrage on the spot rate, on the size of the international short-term capital movements and on the domestic money supply.They want to thank Mr. William Schep for his helpful comments with regard to the translation into English of the original text.     

Revenue ranking of first-price auctions with resale

When the price setter in post-auction resale is chosen according to exogenous probabilities, Hafalir and Krishna (2008) [2] showed that the first-price auction brings more expected revenues than the second-price auction with truth-bidding bidders. We complete their revenue ranking by proving that the first-price auction produces higher expected revenues the higher the probability the auction winner sets the resale price.     

On virtual communities: individual motivations, reciprocity and we-rationality

Within knowledge-based economies, one of the major forms of organisational change concerns the impact of the introduction and dissemination of information and communication technologies on markets, consumers and firms. The existence of virtual or ‘electronic’ communities is one of the main consequences of this impact. In this context, the main purpose of this article is to answer the following questions: Why do firms and consumers take part in these communities? Are they driven by the usual or by more specific motivations based on reciprocity or we-rationality? Do these potentially new types of organisation and interaction, and new motivations change the working and the dynamics of our economic systems?     

A spectrum of equilibration processes in game theory

In game theory, four dynamic processes converging towards an equilibrium are distinguished and ordered by way of agents' decreasing cognitive capacities. In the eductive process, each player has enough information to simulate perfectly the others' behavior and gets immediately to the equilibrium. In epistemic learning, each player updates his beliefs about others' future strategies, with regard to their sequentially observed actions. In behavioral learning, each player modifies his own strategies according to the observed payoffs obtained from his past actions. In the evolutionary process, each agent has a fixed strategy and reproduces in proportion to the utilities obtained through stochastic interactions. All along the spectrum, longer term dynamics makes up for weaker rationality, and physical relations substitute for mental interactions. Convergence, if any, is towards an always stronger equilibrium notion and selection of an equilibrium state becomes more sensitive to context and history. The processes can be mixed if associated to different periods, agents or mechanisms and deepened if obtained by formal reasoning principles.     

The future of work: An outline of a method for scenario construction

The nature of work may be described at two levels : the social and the individual. The author identifies four scenarios at each level and is thus able to generate a total of 16 combined scenarios. Of these, four are shown to be the most probable and the author compares them with similar scenarios previously mentioned in the literature.