Network topology and the efficiency of equilibrium

Different kinds of networks, such as transportation, communication, computer, and supply networks, are susceptible to similar kinds of inefficiencies. These arise when congestion externalities make the cost for each user depend on the other users' choice of routes. If each user chooses the least expensive (e.g., the fastest) route from the users' common point of origin to the common destination, the result may be Pareto inefficient in that an alternative choice of routes would reduce the costs for all users. Braess's paradox represents an extreme kind of inefficiency, in which the equilibrium costs may be reduced by raising the cost curves. As this paper shows, this paradox occurs in an (undirected) two-terminal network if and only if it is not series-parallel. More generally, Pareto inefficient equilibria occur in a network if and only if one of three simple networks is embedded in it.     

Harmonic sequence paradox

Summary. Informal evidence suggests that individuals are willing to pay only a finite and, typically, very low price for a specific lottery that converges to an infinite payment with probability one. The established decision theories (expected value, expected utility theory, cumulative prospect theory) cannot satisfactorily explain this low willingness to pay. The presented paradox strengthens the original and the super St. Petersburg paradox.Received: 27 Spetember 2004, Revised: 15 January 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C91, D81.I am grateful to Peter Wakker, whose suggestions helped to simplify significantly the exposition of the main idea, and to the participants of a brown-bag seminar at CERGE-EI (June 23, 2004, Prague), notably Dirk Engelmann and Andreas Ortmann, who suggested interesting testable explanations for the paradox.     

国有资本营运机构与地方国有资产管理体制之落实

建立在公有制基础上的社会主义市场经济的核心是在推进市场运行机制的同时,完成经济运行载体的制度性构造。因与私人产权的运行逻辑不同,国有产权的实现需在宪政层面上展开。国有资本营运机构处于“政”、“企”的接口环节,完善国有资本营运机构的制度设计及规范其在现实生活中的重组,对于落实地方国有资产管理体制,实现政资分离、政企分开具有关键意义。     

A new intellectual property metric for standardization activities

This study formulates a method to measure the effects of standardization to assist in evaluating innovation and R&D policies. Its main purpose is to examine standardization activities within R&D organizations. This allows for a more appropriate policy evaluation framework than examining such activities within standard development organizations does. The study also redefines the conventional notion of intellectual property (IP) normatively and introduces the term “integrated IP” to reflect our new concept of joining IP and standardization activities. Our new concept captures the “fuzzy” impact of standardization on R&D to improve innovation management. The study presents a vector equation expressing the new IP definition and uses it to model revenues arising from a standard-essential patent for strategic IP management with standardization. The model indicates the importance of patents commercially required for product differentiation for the purpose of innovation with standards.     

A two-sector model with target-return pricing in a stock-flow consistent framework

In this paper, we build a generalized two-sector Kaleckian growth model and explore the dynamics towards long-run positions. The model incorporates conflicting claims of labour and firms over income distribution and endogenous labour-saving technical progress. Adopting a stock-flow consistent framework, our simulation experiments yield the following results. First, the ‘paradox of thrift’ and the ‘paradox of costs’ hold, meaning that lower saving rates generate higher growth rates while higher real wages generate higher profit rates, but the magnitude of the impact depends on the initial status of income distribution and monetary policy. Second, changes in autonomous labour-saving innovations might explain the phenomenon of the ‘New Economy’ of the second half of the 1990s within an alternative framework. Our simulations with a two-sector model retrieve the analytical results achieved with a one-sector Kaleckian model, with the addition of path dependence.     

论生态工业园悖论、成因及其解决之道

首先将生态工业园建设迅猛发展的客观实际和其现阶段经济环境效益严重不足之间的矛盾,称之为生态工业园悖论。然后探讨了其成因,并指出其解决之道在于提高生态工业园的竞争力。进而指出,在构建生态工业园的全过程中必须通过技术创新和制度创新等手段,充分进行技术经济论证,要努力使生态工业园各投资主体获得不低于其社会平均收益率的经济效益,真正实现通过合理的、甚至是部分超额的经济利益来驱动各投资主体投资“资源节约型、环境友好型”项目,进而实现良性推动循环经济的目的,这是我们解决生态工业园悖论的根本之举。     

The Strategic Management of Trade Secrets in Technology-based Firms

The importance of trade secrets to the effective strategic management of technology-based firms can make the difference between economic success and failure for significant new product lines, or even the firm itself. This article proposes the conceptual outlines of a framework addressing the strategic management of trade secrets. The author identifies three environments that strongly influence strategy formulation (legal and market) and strategy implementation (organizational). A conceptual framework for trade secret strategy formulation is developed, offering a logical approach to reaching a managerial choice of trade secrecy over other forms of intellectual property protection. Discussion of trade secret strategy implementation invokes an emphasis on managerial control structures and mechanisms, focusing on the use of the trade secret audit, the identification of components of an implementation strategy (e.g., employee education, controlling physical and electronic access, and monitoring competitors), and an ever vigilant defense of trade secret protection pursued in the courts.     

Political entrepreneurship,emergent dynamics,and constitutional politics

Constitutional political economy mostly distinguishes between rules and actions, with rules selected prior to actions within those rules. While we accept the coherence of this distinction, we pursue it within an open rather than closed scheme of analysis. Doing this entails recognition that societies rarely exhibit universal agreement about constitutional provisions. Recognizing the incomplete character of constitutional agreement points to the existence of margins of contestation. Along those margins, political entrepreneurship will be active in promoting support for alternative constitutional interpretations. Within open systems of creative and entrepreneurial action, constitutional reinterpretation is continually injected into society. Acquiescence in the presence of power does not imply agreement about its use. Rather, acquiescence means the constitutional contestation becomes an element of ordinary politics and not an activity that is prior to ordinary politics. It also means that emergent dynamics supplements comparative statics as a method of analysis.     

Evaluating the employability paradox: When does organizational investment in human capital pay off?

Abstract

The paper explores the notion of the employability paradox which notes that while organizations investing in the career and competency development of their workforce can benefit from higher performance, they also risk losing more employable staff to competitors. Building on contributions from social exchange theory and signalling theory, we develop a model exploring the circumstances under which investment in career development benefits employees and organizations. We test our model in a longitudinal study following graduates entering the labour market. Our results show that when organizations signal that they care about employees by investing in their career development and individuals are receptive to such signals and proactively seek to manage their careers, investment in career development has a positive impact on organizational commitment and intention to stay with one’s employer. Our findings indicate that the idea of the employability paradox is simplistic and lacks theoretical and empirical support.     

Seeing and Doing: the Concept of Causation

This note is an extended review of the book by Judea Pearl (2000) on causality, in which the basic concepts therein are explained in a form that statisticians will hopefully appreciate, including some comments on their relevance to inference and decision-making.