Maximum-Revenue and Optimum-Welfare Tariffs in International Mixed Duopoly: Does the Order of Firms’ Move Matter?

This paper examines the effect of privatization on the priority of the maximum-revenue tariff and the optimum-welfare tariff in a mixed oligopoly with partial privatization and foreign competition. Major findings of this paper are that: firstly, in a mixed duopoly with partial privatization and asymmetric marginal costs, when the marginal cost of the privatized firm is higher than a critical value, the optimum-welfare tariff will be lower than the maximum-revenue tariff regardless of the order of firms?? move; secondly, if the degree of privatization is sufficiently high and cost is symmetric, the optimum-welfare tariff will be higher than the maximum-revenue tariff; thirdly, if the degree of privatization is sufficiently high and the domestic firm is highly ineffective in production, under Stackelberg public leadership, the optimum-welfare tariff is low and then it is more possible that the optimum-welfare tariff is lower than the maximum-revenue one.     

Speculative dynamics

We develop a method for solving for equilibrium outcomes in stationary strategic settings in which speculators are informationally large and understand how their actions affect the information content of prices. This allows us to characterize speculation by institutional investors who receive private long-lived information on a recurring basis, and trade strategically. When the underlying asset value process has a stationary autoregressive structure, we develop a contraction mapping argument to solve for the stationary linear equilibrium. We derive analytically and numerically how the characteristics of private information—its quantity, persistence and correlation, and division among speculators—affect trading profits, pricing and trading strategies. Our central finding is that what matters for equilibrium outcomes are the most recent signals that speculators receive. Speculators trade so much more aggressively on new information than old that the bulk of their profits come from their two or three most recent private signals. Trading on past prices drops off faster yet; effectively only the most recent price matters.     

Sensibler Umgang verhindert Retraumatisierung

Traumatische Erfahrungen begleiten Betroffene ein Leben lang - Wird bei einer Krankenhauseinweisung oder beim Umzug in ein Pflegeheim die Posttraumatische Belastungsst?rung nicht erkannt, kann es leicht zu Traumareaktivierungen kommen, die auch juristisch bedeutsame Entscheidungen nach sich ziehen k?nnen.     

Nachhaltige Weiterbildungen

Implementierung von Expertenstandards anhand eines Multiplikatorenmodells - Multiplikatoren werden eingesetzt, um theoretisches Wissen im beruflichen Alltag effizienter anzuwenden. Dieses Model wird inzwischen auch bei der Implementierung von Expertenstandards in der station?ren Altenpflege eingesetzt: Speziell geschulte Mitarbeiter sollen sicherstellen, dass die Umsetzung und Anwendung der Standards am Arbeitsplatz nachhaltig gelingt. Wie l?sst sich aber der hierzu notwendige Lerntransfer sicherstellen?     

Effects of Consumers’ Efforts on Price and Promotion Fairness Perceptions

This research examines how consumers’ efforts as a nonmonetary sacrifice influence their price and promotion fairness perceptions in the context of price promotions. Multiple studies using different price promotion tactics demonstrate that consumers’ perceived level of effort to obtain a reduced price negatively influences their fairness perceptions when they deny the promoted price. Exploring the underlying mechanisms of this effect, we show that the amount of effort consumers exert to obtain a promoted price leads to their feeling of deservingness and entitlement. When the promoted price is denied, this feeling of entitlement is violated, causing unfairness perceptions to occur. The research demonstrates that, in addition to retailers’ actions such as price changes, consumers’ actions, in the form of their effort input, are also an important determinant of fairness perceptions.     

Russian enterprises in mid-2008: Characteristics of precrisis behavior

The findings of a regular survey of real sector enterprises, conducted by the Laboratory for the Analysis and Forecasting of Microeconomic Processes at the IEF, RAS, are analyzed and commented on.     

On the problem of scale: Hayek, Kohr, Jacobs and the reinvention of the political state

There is no shortage of crises in the ecological (e.g. climate change), economic (e.g. the Global Financial Crisis), and socio-political spheres (e.g. the Arab Spring). While such crises are not new to the human saga, both the magnitude and frequency of these crises seem to be intensifying. The usual prognosis follows the public/private dichotomy, suggesting more or less government intervention (and the closely related variants of more integration and regime change). However, there are ‘islands’ of alternative analyses where crises result from scale distortion (organisational structures of states, markets and firms that are too large or too small) and scale entanglement (strong rather than weak ties between different scales such as the local, national and global). This paper attempts to synthesise this scale problematisation into one coherent school of thought. To this end, we introduce the complexity ansatz, which links complexity to symmetry (breaking), scale and collapse. To illustrate, the paper traces this ansatz in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Léopold Kohr and Jane Jacobs (HKJ). The thesis is that the moribund nation state needs to be relegated to a subsidiary role to evade collapse. Loosely coupled (fiscally and monetarily) autonomous city-regions should be the ‘eyes’ of socio-economic action.     

Announcements

Abstract

In this study we examined the effect of specialization on behavioral choice among Wisconsin goose hunters, who were able to choose a relatively easy hunt at the Horicon Marsh or a more complex hunt in the exterior zones. Past research has shown that more specialized recreationists have differing motives, attitudes, satisfaction levels, crowding perceptions, environmental preferences, and management preferences. Our goal in this study was to extend this research to behavioral choices and to learn more about the dimensions of specialization in goose hunting. Specialization did not predict behavioral choice among the sample. Specialization, as measured by past experience, commitment, media involvement, club membership, and preferred hunting style, did not differ significantly when comparing Horicon goose hunters and exterior zone hunters. Novice hunters hunted alongside experienced hunters, and behavioral choice appeared to be more a function of structural constraint than attitu‐dinal preference. Specialization did explain differences in hunter judgments of quality, correlating negatively with shooting and bagging and positively with social and natural components of a quality experience. These findings indicate that although the specialization framework can effectively predict attitudinal differences among participants in a given activity, it is less efficient at predicting behavioral choice. Consequently, specialization researchers need to be cautious about inferring levels of specialization from observations of locational choice.     

Sustainability and forest transitions in the southern Yucatán: The land architecture approach

Consistent with the challenges of sustainability science, land architecture offers a comprehensive approach to land system dynamics useful for numerous types of assessments, ranging from the vulnerability of coupled human–environment systems to forest transitions. With antecedents in several research communities, land architecture addresses the tradeoffs within and between the human and environmental subsystems of land systems in terms of the kind, magnitude, and pattern of land uses and covers. This approach is especially cogent for changes in tropical forests, given the broad-ranging forces acting on them and the equally broad-ranging consequences of their loss. The rudiments of the land architecture approach are illustrated for changes in seasonal tropical forests in the southern Yucatán of Mexico, the pivot of which is the Calakmul biosphere reserve. Simplifying the dynamics involved, the region-wide land architecture is the collective design of stakeholders with different land-use goals that favor tradeoffs in subsystem outcomes serving better either the reserve and related programs or the smallholder farmers that populate the region. A major tradeoff involves forest cover per se, which holds implications for forest transition theory. Evidence for an incipient transition involves the scale of analysis taken. The dynamics involved hold too much uncertainty to forecast a permanent transition to more forest cover and imply that more complex but robust versions of the theory are required.