南宁市机动车安全技术检测站的智能远程监控查验系统

根据公安部102号令、国家标准《机动车运行安全技术条件》(GB 7258—2004)第三号修改单及公安部《机动车查验工作规程》(GA 801—2008)要求,南宁市车管所于2011年5月1日对市区内所有的机动车安全技术检测站启用远程查验系统。该系统从根本上改变了对机动车的传统查验模式,进一步规范了警队执法尺度,解放了警力,提高了工作效率,实现了对机动车公平和有效的监管。     

刍议当代中国理论经济学的重建

建立理论经济学必须从现实经济的实践中吸收营养，坚持定性优先、定量为辅的原则，应避免过早完成形式化，模型化的探索；必须具有扎实、深厚的理论及基本体系；必须能够正确揭示经济运行规律、判断经济关系的历史地位，为经济的制度安排提供强有力的思想指导。     

Insurance market mechanisms and government interventions

The expansion of the State-as-insurer has played a major role in the long-term growth of the public sector, but we are probably reaching the turning point. Because of its manifold failures, the State-as-insurer is facing crisis all around the world, with exploding expenditures. This will probably induce a shift in the private–public frontier, which makes it much more important than in the past to regulate the insurance industry efficiently. Coming back to the failures of the State-as-insurer, we should underline the role played by this flawed hypothesis that sets market logic and private interest against public interest.     

Contractibility and Transparency of Financial Statement Information Prepared Under IFRS: Evidence from Debt Contracts Around IFRS Adoption

We outline several properties of IFRS that potentially affect the contractibility or the transparency of financial statement information, and hence the use of that information in debt contracts. Those properties include the increased choice among accounting rules IFRS gives to managers, enhanced rule‐making uncertainty, and increased emphasis on fair value accounting. Consistent with reduced contractibility of IFRS financial statement information, we find a significant reduction in accounting‐based debt covenants following mandatory IFRS adoption. The reduction in accounting covenant use is associated with measures of the difference between prior domestic standards and IFRS. Because IFRS adoption changed financial reporting in many ways simultaneously, it is difficult to trace the decline in accounting covenant use to individual IFRS properties, though we report larger declines in accounting covenant use in banks, which have a higher proportion of assets and liabilities that are fair‐valued. Our findings are better explained by reduced contractibility than by increased transparency, which would predict reduced nonaccounting covenant use as well, whereas we observe increases. Overall, we conclude that IFRS rules sacrifice debt contracting usefulness to achieve other objectives, such as provision of accounting information relevant to valuation.     

On the economics of Internet peering

We discuss economic rationales behind peering decisions in the Internet. In the first part of the paper we analyze the decision about a bilateral peering agreement between two commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) who are in Cournot competition. In the second part we discuss multilateral peering between commercial ISPs and an academic research network (ARN). The latter is organized as a club of academic institutions who share the cost of their network. It is discussed whether peering threatens the existence of the ARN and under what circumstances a commercial ISP would want to use strategic pricing to win all ARN‐members as customers. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The effects of costly exploration on optimal investment timing

This paper investigates a principal–agent model in which an owner (principal) optimizes a contract with a manager (agent) who has been delegated to undertake an investment project. In the model, we explore the effects of costly exploration by which the manager learns the real value of development cost. We show that high exploration cost can lead to a pooling policy not contingent on project type. Further, and more notably, we show that, in the presence of asymmetric information, higher exploration cost leads to wealth transfer from owner to manager and can ultimately improve social welfare.     

Persuasion and learning by countersignaling

We model countersignaling (i.e., very high types refraining from signaling) arising from the tradeoff between persuasion and learning in a signaling game. We assume that the agent has imperfect private information regarding his/her productivity, which the signaling action provides additional verifiable information about. A higher-type agent benefits more from providing such objective, albeit imprecise, “proof” for the market, but may also gain less from learning about his/her productivity. When the latter effect dominates the former for the very high types, the equilibrium exhibits countersignaling: very high and low types pool on refraining from signaling, and only the medium types signal. Under certain conditions, the countersignaling equilibrium is the unique pure-strategy perfect sequential equilibrium.     

TIME TO MARKET AND IMPATIENT CUSTOMERS

We analyse the decision of firms about when to launch their products on the market when they produce differentiated goods and compete on prices. We find two subgame perfect equilibria: one in which the high‐quality firm holds its leadership in quality, and another in which the low‐quality firm leapfrogs its rival. When the initial level of differentiation is high enough, the low‐quality firm always launches first. Finally, we extend this model to analyse commercial piracy. We obtain that pirates are highly unlikely to launch the illegal copy first because they would bear a higher penalty and a higher risk of being detected.     

影响漏电起痕试验结果的因素分析

针对绝缘材料漏电起痕试验中存在的影响正确试验结果的问题,例如试样选取、试样预处理、溶液配置、实验设备清洗及安装等方面,本文根据GB/T 4207-2003和IEC60112-2003标准的要求,通过对标准的理解和经验的总结,提出了影响漏电起痕实验结果的各种因素及相应的处理方法,在一定程度上能够减少试验误差,提高试验准确性,有助于相关检测部门改进试验方法。