The Independence Postulate,Hypothetical and Called-off Acts: a further reply to Rabinowicz

The Independence postulate links current preferences between called-off acts with current preferences between constant acts. Under the assumption that the chance-events used in compound von Neumann-Morgenstern lotteries are value-neutral, current preferences between these constant acts are linked to current preferences between hypothetical acts, conditioned by those chance events. Under an assumption of stability of preferences over time, current preferences between these hypothetical acts are linked to future preferences between what are then and there constant acts. Here, I show that a failure of Independence with respect to current preferences leads to an inconsistency in sequential decisions. Two called-off acts are constructed such that each is admissible in the same sequential decision and yet one is strictly preferred to the other. This responds to a question regarding admissibility posed by Rabinowicz ([2000] Preference stability and substitution of indifferents: A rejoinder to Seidenfeld, Theory and Decision 48: 311–318 [this issue]).     

Substitution of indifferent options at choice nodes and admissibility: a reply to Rabinowicz

Tiebreak rules are necessary for revealing indifference in non- sequential decisions. I focus on a preference relation that satisfies Ordering and fails Independence in the following way. Lotteries a and b are indifferent but the compound lottery 0.5f, 0.5b is strictly preferred to the compound lottery 0.5f, 0.5a. Using tiebreak rules the following is shown here: In sequential decisions when backward induction is applied, a preference like the one just described must alter the preference relation between a and b at certain choice nodes, i.e., indifference between a and b is not stable. Using this result, I answer a question posed by Rabinowicz (1997) concerning admissibility in sequential decisions when indifferent options are substituted at choice nodes.     

On Seidenfeld‘s Criticism of Sophisticated Violations of the Independence Axiom 1

An agent who violates independence can avoid dynamic inconsistency in sequential choice if he is sophisticated enough to make use of backward induction in planning. However, Seidenfeld has demonstrated that such a sophisticated agent with dependent preferences is bound to violate the principle of dynamic substitution, according to which admissibility of a plan is preserved under substitution of indifferent options at various choice nodes in the decision tree. Since Seidenfeld considers dynamic substitution to be a coherence condition on dynamic choice, he concludes that sophistication cannot save a violator of independence from incoherence. In response to McClennens objection that relying on dynamic substitution when independence is at stake must be question-begging, Seidenfeld undertakes to prove that dynamic substitution follows from the principle of backward induction alone, provided we assume that the agents admissible choices from different sets of feasible plans are all based on a fixed underlying preference ordering of plans. This paper shows that Seidenfelds proof fails: depending on the interpretation, it is either invalid or based on an unacceptable assumption.     

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this aticle: The Political Economy of the Welfare State By THOMAS WILSON AND DOROTHY J. WILSON. Corporatism and Welfare By ALAN CAWSON. Whither State Welfare? Policy and Implementation in the Personal Social Services 1979–80. By ADRIAN WEBB AND GERALD WISTOW. Culture of the Social Services By ANDREW KAKABADSE. Public Participation in Local Services By N. BOADEN et al. Don't Mourn for me … Organise: The Social and Political Uses of Voluntary Organisations By DAVID SCOTT. Economics and Social Policy By ALAN GORDON. Europe Against Poverty — The European Poverty Programme 1975–80 By JANE DENNETT et al. Health Policy in Britain By CHRISTOPHER HAM. Policy Making and Planning in the Health Sector By KENNETH LEE AND ANNE MILLS. Industrial Relations and Health Services By A. S. SETHI AND S. J. DIMMOCK (eds.) The Economics of Outpatient Clinic Location: the paediatrics case By J. G. CULLIS, S. HEASELL AND S. WELLER. The Economics of Unemployment in Britain By JOHN GREEDY (ed.) Workless By DENNIS MARSDEN. Discrimination and Disadvantage in Employment: The Experience of Black Workers By P. BRAHAM, E. RHODES AND M. PEARN (eds.) Unqualified and Underemployed: Handicapped Young People and the Labour Market By ALAN WALKER. Family Care of the Handicapped Elderly: Who Pays? By MURIEL NISSEL AND LUCY BONNERJEA. Capitalism and the Construction of Old Age By CHRIS PHILLIPSON. Policy Making for the Mentally Handicapped By GREGORY S. DONGES.     

The effects of free trade areas on non-members: Modelling Kemp–Vanek admissibility

A multi-sector multi-country Numerical General Equilibrium model is used to endogenously determine the trade taxes that FTA members need to charge on non-member trade so that after the FTA is formed, FTA-member trade volumes with non-members remain at their pre-FTA level. We apply the notion of Kemp–Vanek admissibility in McMillan [McMillan, J. (1993), Does regional integration foster open trade? Economic theory and GATT's Article XXIV” In Anderson, K. & R. Blackhurst (Eds.), Regional Integration and the Global Trading System. London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf] to construct an FTA which does not make non-members of the FTA worse off, ensuring that the FTA is necessarily a building block and not a stumbling block to global free trade. We implement the path-independent welfare decomposition in Harrison et al. [Harrison, G., Rutherford, T. & Wooton, I. (1993). An alternative welfare decomposition for customs unions. Canadian Journal of Economics, 26(4), 961–68]. Results of such experiments are relevant to the current debate under the WTO's Doha Round of trade negotiations over GATT (1994) Article XXIV which evaluates the consistency of FTAs with the WTO.     

Social Analysis and Criticism

As automation develops, physical labor becomes more skilled and the cultural and educational level of workers rises. Brain work ceases to be the property of an elite, and social and economic differences gradually disappear in the communist society. Voprosy Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), 1961, No. 9; slightly abridged.     

Social choice in a sequential environment

In a recent paper [2] we presented a model of societies. In the context of that model, we argued that in the field of social choice it is necessary to consider some type of cardinal utility indices if we want to develop a sensible analysis. The main purpose of the present article is to complete and extend an argument initiated in Section 5 of [2] by giving a rigorous formulation and proof of a theorem informally discussed there.To formulate rigorously our theorem a concept of impersonality is introduced that appears to be more general than those which have been used in the economic literature.Our arguments concerning the need to use cardinal utility indices in the field of social choice are shown to be similar to those used by the proponents of decentralization in the controversy regarding centralization and decentralization as alternative ways of organizing the economic activity of a society.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Econometric Society Winter Meeting held in Toronto, Canada, December 1972.     

An empirical test of ordinal independence

In this article, we test Green and Jullien's (1988) Ordinal Independence (OI) Axiom, an axiom necessary for any rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU) model, including Cumulative Prospect Theory (Tversky and Kahneman, 1992). We observe systematic violations of OI (some within-subject violation rates of over 50%). These patterns of choice cannot be explained by any RDEU theory alone. We suggest that subjects are employing an editing operation prior to evaluation: if an outcome-probability pair is common to both gambles, it is cancelled when the commonality is transparent; otherwise, it is not cancelled. We interpret the results with respect to both original and cumulative prospect theory and the known empirical properties of the weighting function.     

The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England

Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520 (1989), xvi + 297 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25.00, paperback £8.95).

Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (1988), x + 227 (University of California Press, Berkeley, $30.00).

Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and the ‘Lower Sort’ during the American Revolution (1988), xv + 373 (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, $40.00).

Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1700–1820 (1987), xxiii + 378 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, £20.95).

Malcolm Chase, The People's Farm: English Radical Agrarianism 1775–1840 (1988), vi + 221 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £25.00).

Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornogra‐phers in London, 1795–1840 (1988), xvi + 338 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £27.50).

Alan Armstrong, Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History, 1770–1980 (1988), 302 (Batsford, London, £29.95).

Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (1988), 450 (Falmer Press, Brighton, no price).

Chad Gaffield, Language, Schooling and Cultural Conñict. The Origins of the French‐Language Controversy in Ontario (1987), 249 (McGill‐Queen's University Press, no price).

Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916. The Market, the Law, and Politics (1988), xiv + 484 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00, paperback £12.50).

Dieter Dowe (ed.), Jugendprotest und Generationenkonflikt in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert: Deutschland, England, Frankreich und Italien im Vergleich? (1986), xiv + 473 (Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn, no price).

? [Youth Protest and Generational Conflict in Twentieth‐Century Europe: Germany, England, France and Italy in Comparison.]

Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Managerial Science (1987), x + 293 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £27.50).

Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (1987), xiv + 482 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £27.50, $34.50).

Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War (1988), xiv+ 431 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, $42.50).

Charles Webster, The Health Services Since the War. Vol. 1: Problems of Health Care. The National Health Service Before 1957 (1988), x + 479 (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, £27.50).     

Timing contradictions in von Neumann and Morgenstern's axioms and in savage's ‘sure-thing’ proof

At the point of choice, let N be the delay in learning the outcome. Then von Neumann and Morgenstern's postulates contradictorily imply that N = 0 and N > 0. As a consequence, Savage's sure-thing proof, which has bestowed on expected utility theory most of its normative appeal, depends on inconsistent assumptions. Further, the validity of Savage's proof cannot be retrieved by minimizing N > 0, by making the delay a mere moment or so. The historical origins of these contradictions are traced to (i) von Neumann and Morgenstern inadvertently limiting their risk model to the certain period, that is the period after gamblers learn the outcome(s), and (ii) Savage's use of the sure-thing principle for analysing atemporally but also quite formally compound gambles [Savage, 1954, p. 23].     

Open Borders to a Revolution: Culture,Politics and Migration

Susan Migden Socolow, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: Amor al Real Servicio (1987), xxi + 356 (Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., $45.00).

W. Hamish Fraser, Conflict and Class. Scottish Workers 1700–1838 (1988), 202 (John Donald, £20.00).

Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City (1987), xii + 259 (The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, £24.00).

Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives. Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939 (1988), xii + 187 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £22.50).

Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth‐Century Britain (1988), xv + 298 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, £30.00).

F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (1988), 271 (Croom Helm, £25.00).     

The mutual determination of wants and benefits

The degree to which I want something often affects the amount of pleasure or other benefit it will bring me if I get it. This, in turn, should affect the degree to which I want it. In theJournal of Philosophy,89 (1992) 10–29, Anna Kusser and Wolfgang Spohn argue that decision theory cannot cope with this mutual determination of wants and benefits. This paper argues, to the contrary, that decision theory can cope with it easily.     

How a certain internal consistency entails the expected utility dogma

If I am coherent, in the sense that I can always replace any subset of outcomes by their certainty equivalent (occurring with the sum of their probabilities), then I must act according to the dogma of maximizing an Exp {U}, ruling out Machina [1982], Allais [1952], and Ysidro [1950] functionals.     

Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars

John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (1989), xiv + 335(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00).

Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (1989), xxii + 416 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £37.50).

William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989), xi + 466, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £17.50).

E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (1988), vii + 146 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £17.50).

Pat Hudson, Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain (1989), xiii + 277 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £30.00).

Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments. The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid‐Victorian England (1989), xi + 282 (Virago Press, £12.99).

Gerald D. Surh, 1905 in St Petersburg: Labor, Society and Revolution (1989), xvii + 456 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, $45.00).

Geoffrey Swain

Bristol Polytechnic

Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (1989), xx + 449 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £25.00).

Arthur Marwick (ed.), Total War and Social Change (1988), 160 (Macmillan, £29.50, paperback £8.95).

Vladimir Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (1988), xii + 243 (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, £40.00).

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (1988), xviii + 364 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £27.50).

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (1988), xv + 325 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25.00).

Peter Duus (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century (1988) xviii + 866 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £60.00).

Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture (1989), viii + 238 (Polity Press, Cambridge, £25.00).     

A Note on Implementation of Bargaining Solutions

Miyagawa (Games and Economics Behavior 41(2), 292–308 [2002]) provides a simple extensive game form that implements a large class of two-agent bargaining solutions in subgame-perfect equilibrium. This class includes all of the Nash, Kalai–Smorodinsky, and relative utilitarian solutions. This note extends Miyagawa’s result to multi-agent bargaining problems.     

Evaluation of Early Adolescent Subjective Well-Being in Terms of Submissive Behavior and Self-Esteem

This research aimed to investigate the correlation between subjective well-being and submissive behavior and self-esteem in students in the early adolescent period. The research was completed with a relational design. The research group comprised sixth, seventh, and eighth class middle school students in the spring term of the 2015–2016 academic year in Trabzon province. Data collection tools included a Personal Information Form, Submissive Behavior Scale, Two-Dimensional Self-Respect Scale (Self-Liking and Self-Confidence Scale), Satisfaction with Life Scale and Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. The results of the correlation analysis found a significant positive correlation between subjective well-being and self-esteem (r?=?0.54, p?<?0.01; 95% CI [0.44, 0.61], Cohen’s d?=?1.28); however, the correlation between subjective well-being and submissive behavior was not significant (r?=?–0.02, p?>?0.05; 95% CI [–0.11, 0.09], Cohen’s d?=?0.04). There was a significant negative correlation identified between self-esteem and submissive behavior (r?=?–0.10, p < 0.05; 95% CI [–0.20, –0.01], Cohen’s d?=?–0.20). Additionally, according to our findings, self-esteem accounts for 29% of the variation in well-being (F(1, 367)?=?150.79, p?<?0.001). The contribution of self-esteem to the subjective well-being explanatory model was found to be significant (sz?=?0.54, p?<?0.001).     

First Textbooks on Modern History

The second half of 1997 saw the publication, at last, of textbooks on modern history for the basic school (Modern History. Part I: A Textbook for the Seventh Grade of the Basic School [Novaia istoriia. Chast' I: Uchebnik dlia 7 klassa osnovnoi shkoly], L. N. Zharova, I. A. Mishina, M. V. Ponomarev, V. A. Rogozhkin, A. A. Fedorenko [Moscow: Center for Humanities Education, 1997]; and Modern History, 1500-1800: A Textbook for the Seventh Grade of General Education Institutions [Novaia istoriia, 1500-1800: Uchebnik dlia 7 klassa obshcheobra-zovatel'nykh uchrezhdenii], A. Ia. Udovskaia, P. A. Baranov, L. M. Vaniushkina [Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1997]). Their lack had created a dead-end situation in me seventh and eighth grades. Since they came out in press runs of 50,000, they are not going to make it into all the schools. What is important, however, is that a beginning has been made. Let us hope that these will be followed by reprintings as well as the publication of new books.     

Relations over Time among Children's Shyness,Emotionality, and Internalizing Problems

Data regarding children's shyness and emotionality were collected at three time points, two years apart (T1: N = 214, M = 6.12 years; T2: N = 185, M = 7.67 years; T3: N = 185, M = 9.70 years), and internalizing data were collected at T1 and T3. Relations among parent‐rated shyness, emotionality [parent‐ and teacher‐rated anger, sadness, and positive emotional intensity (EI)], and mother‐rated internalizing were examined in panel models. In some cases, shyness predicted emotionality two years later (teacher‐rated anger, parent‐rated sadness, and teacher‐rated positive EI) and emotionality sometimes predicted shyness two years later (teacher‐rated sadness, parent‐rated positive EI, and teacher‐rated positive EI). Parent‐rated shyness and/or emotionality (parent‐rated anger and parent‐rated sadness) predicted internalizing at T3. Results shed light on developmental relations between emotionality and shyness, as well as processes of risk for, or protection against, the development of internalizing problems.     

Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt

Trevor Dean, Land and Power in Late Medieval Ferrara. The Rule of the Este, 1350–1450 (1988), xiv + 212 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25.00).

C.J. Wickham, The Mountains and the City. The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages (1988), xxxiii + 427, 10 maps (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £40.00).

Peter Clark and David Souden (eds), Migration and Society in Early Modern England (1987), 355 (Hutchinson, £35.00).

Sharon V. Salinger, ’To Serve Well and Faithfully’: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (1987), xiv + 192 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25.00.)

Keith Michael Baker (ed.), The Political Culture of the Old Regime (1987), xxiv + 559 (Pergamon Press, £60.00).

Jean‐Claude Bonnet (ed.), La Carmagnole des Muses. L'Homme de lettres et l'artiste dans la Revolution (1988), 426 (Armand Colin, Paris, 180ff).

Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (1988), 264 (Routledge, £30.00).

Edna Hindie Lemay, La Vie quotidienne des députés aux Etats Généraux: 1789 (1987), 273 (Hachette, 100FF).

Detlef K. Muller, Fritz Ringer and Brian Simon (eds), The Rise of the Modern Educational System. Structural Change and Social Reproduction, 1870–1920 (1987), xiv + 264 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £27.50).

Paul Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (1987), 241 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £25.00).

Gerard Noiriel, Le Creuset français. Histoire de l'immigration XIXe‐XXe siècles (1988), (Le Seuil, Paris, 160ff).

David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (1987), 494 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £30.00, paperback £12.95).

John Holford, Reshaping Labour: Organization, Work and Politics in Edinburgh in the Great War and After (1988), xii + 276 (Croom Helm, £30.00).

Bill Lancaster, Radicalism, Co‐operation and Socialism: Leicester Working‐Class Politics 1860–1906 (1987), xxii + 232 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, £27.50).

Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working‐Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston 188o‐1940 (1987), xii + 280 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25.00).

Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (1987), x + 285 (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, £30.00).

Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women's Roles in Rural Development in the Soviet Union (1987), xvii + 259 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25.00).

Tony Novak, Poverty and the State: An Historical Sociology (1988), xi + 212 (Open University Press, Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, £22.50, paperback

John Clarke, Allan Cochrane and Carol Smart, Ideologies of Welfare: From Dreams to Disillusion (1987), 206 (Hutchinson Education, paperback £7.95).

E.P. Hennock, British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance 1880–1914 (1987), vi + 243 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £25.00).     

What are the minimal requirements of rational choice? Arguments from the sequential-decision setting

There are at least two plausible generalisations of subjective expected utility (SEU) theory: cumulative prospect theory (which relaxes the independence axiom) and Levi’s decision theory (which relaxes at least ordering). These theories call for a re-assessment of the minimal requirements of rational choice. Here, I consider how an analysis of sequential decision making contributes to this assessment. I criticise Hammond’s (Economica 44(176):337–350, 1977; Econ Philos 4:292–297, 1988a; Risk, decision and rationality, 1988b; Theory Decis 25:25–78, 1988c) ‘consequentialist’ argument for the SEU preference axioms, but go on to formulate a related diachronic-Dutch-book-style’ argument that better achieves Hammond’s aims. Some deny the importance of Dutch-book sure losses, however, in which case, Seidenfeld’s (Econ Philos 4:267–290, 1988a) argument that distinguishes between theories that relax independence and those that relax ordering is relevant. I unravel Seidenfeld’s argument in light of the various criticisms of it and show that the crux of the argument is somewhat different and much more persuasive than what others have taken it to be; the critical issue is the modelling of future choices between ‘indifferent’ decision-tree branches in the sequential setting. Finally, I consider how Seidenfeld’s conclusions might nonetheless be resisted.