Spatial Dispersion as a Dynamic Coordination Problem

Following Schelling (1960), coordination problems have mainly been considered in a context where agents can achieve a common goal (e.g., rendezvous) only by taking common actions. Dynamic versions of this problem have been studied by Crawford and Haller (1990), Ponssard (1994), and Kramarz (1996). This paper considers an alternative dynamic formulation in which the common goal (dispersion) can only be achieved by agents taking distinct actions. The goal of spatial dispersion has been studied in static models of habitat selection, location or congestion games, and network analysis. Our results show how this goal can be achieved gradually, by indistinguishable non-communicating agents, in a dynamic setting.     

Hostage taking: Understanding terrorism event dynamics

This paper employs advanced time series methods to identify the dynamic properties of three hostage taking series. The immediate and long run multipliers of three covariates—successful past negotiations, violent ends, and deaths—are identified. Each hostage series responds differently to the covariates. Past concessions have the strongest impact on generating future kidnapping events, supporting the conventional wisdom to abide by a stated no-concession policy. Each hostage series has different changepoints caused by a variety of circumstances. Skyjackings and kidnappings are negatively correlated, while skyjackings and other hostage events are positively correlated. Policy recommendations are offered.     

Aspects of Arranged Marriages and the Theory of Markov Decision Processes

The theory of Markov decision processes (MDP) can be used to analyze a wide variety of stopping time problems in economics. In this paper, the nature of such problems is discussed and then the underlying theory is applied to the question of arranged marriages. We construct a stylized model of arranged marriages and, inter alia, it is shown that a decision maker's optimal policy depends only on the nature of the current marriage proposal, independent of whether there is recall (storage) of previous marriage proposals.     

Minimal representation of a semiorder

In a multicriteria decision problem it may happen that the preference of the decision-maker on some criterion is modeled by means of a semiorder structure. If the available information is qualitative, one often needs a numerical representation of the semiorder. We investigate the set of representations of a semiorder and show that, once a unit has been fixed, there exists a minimal representation. This representation can be calculated by linear programming and exhibits some interesting properties: all values are integer multiples of the unit and are as scattered as possible in the sense that, in the set of all representations contained in the same bounded interval, the minimal representation is a representation for which the minimal distance between two values is maximal. The minimal representation can also be interpreted as a generalisation of the rank function associated to linear orders.     

Pavlov and the prisoner's dilemma

Our Pavlov learns by conditioned response, through rewards and punishments, to cooperate or defect. We analyze the behavior of an extended play Prisoner's Dilemma with Pavlov against various opponents and compute the time and cost to train Pavlov to cooperate. Among our results is that Pavlov and his clone would learn to cooperate more rapidly than if Pavlov played against the Tit for Tat strategy. This fact has implications for the evolution of cooperation.     

The individual rationality of maintaining a sense of justice

Let us say that an individual possesses aprincipled preference if she prefers satisfying her preferences without violating the principles of justice governing her community to satisfying her preferences by violating these principles. Although living among possessors of principled preferences benefits individuals, maintaining such a preference is individually costly. Further, individuals can benefit from others possessing principled preferences without themselves possessing one. In this paper, I argue that occupying a choice situation which mirrors key aspects of our own situation, maximizing rationality requires individuals to develop and maintain principled preferences.To establish that maintaining a principled preference is individually rational for the occupants of such a choice situation, I define a range of individual strategies for them, model their choice of individual strategies as a game, and argue that this game involves an equilibrium in which all of its participants would choose to develop and maintain a principled preference.     

Rational preference: Decision theory as a theory of practical rationality

In general, the technical apparatus of decision theory is well developed. It has loads of theorems, and they can be proved from axioms. Many of the theorems are interesting, and useful both from a philosophical and a practical perspective. But decision theory does not have a well agreed upon interpretation. Its technical terms, in particular, utility and preference do not have a single clear and uncontroversial meaning.How to interpret these terms depends, of course, on what purposes in pursuit of which one wants to put decision theory to use. One might want to use it as a model of economic decision-making, in order to predict the behavior of corporations or of the stock market. In that case, it might be useful to interpret the technical term utility as meaning money profit. Decision theory would then be an empirical theory. I want to look into the question of what utility could mean, if we want decision theory to function as a theory of practical rationality. I want to know whether it makes good sense to think of practical rationality as fully or even partly accounted for by decision theory. I shall lay my cards on the table: I hope it does make good sense to think of it that way. For, I think, if Humeans are right about practical rationality, then decision theory must play a very large part in their account. And I think Humeanism has very strong attractions.     

Games of Competition in a Stochastic Environment

The paper presents a set of games of competition between two or three players in which reward is jointly determined by a stochastic biased mechanism and players’ choices. More specifically, a resource can be found with unequal probabilities in one of two locations. The first agent is rewarded only if it finds the resource and avoids being found by the next agent in line; the latter is rewarded only if it finds the former. Five benchmarks, based on different psychological and game-theoretic assumptions are derived and their predictions compared to actual behavior of 120, 40, and 48 participants playing repeatedly. Of the five benchmarks—the unique (Nash) equilibrium, reinforcement learning, trust-based efficiency, maximum unpredictability, and regret-based (Impulse Balance) equilibrium—regret for missed opportunities best accounts for the qualitative aspect of participants’ behavior and regret attenuated by randomization best accounts for the quantitative aspect of behavior.     

Usury and the problem of exchange under capitalism: a late-nineteenth-century debate on economic rationality

Examining the ambiguous concept of usury, this article retraces political battles over the epistemic framings of the everyday economy in the nineteenth century. It takes a comparative approach to the legal and economic debates on usury in the Habsburg and the German empires in the wake of the economic crisis of the late 1870s, when new laws against usury were introduced. In the respective debates, diverging political interests and class attitudes pitted different conceptualizations of economic exchange against each other. At stake were the diverse forms of commensuration and valuation scales in received credit practices. The new legislation on usury centred on the notion of a usurer’s victim who supposedly was incapable of rational economic action and thus in need of civilization. By way of conclusion, this article relates the story of nineteenth-century usury legislation to current debates among historians on capitalism and the emergence of the economy as a bounded entity. It argues for more analytical attention to historical conflicts over modes of exchange as they came to the fore in the debates on usury, and discusses the implications of this perspective for the history of economic liberalism.     

Markov interactions in a class of dynamic games

This paper contributes to the understanding of economic strategic behaviors in inter-temporal settings. Comparing the MPE and the OLNE of a widely used class of differential games it is shown: (i) what qualifications on behaviors a markov (dynamic) information structure brings about compared with an open-loop (static) information structure, (ii) what is the reason leading to intensified or reduced competition between the agents in the long run. It depends on whether agents’ interactions are characterized by markov substitutability or markov complementarity, which can be seen as dynamic translations of the ideas of strategic substitutability and strategic complementarity (Bulow et al. 1985, Journal of Political Economy 93:488–511). In addition, an important practical contribution of the paper for modelers is to show that these results can be directly deduced from the payoff structure, with no need to compute equilibria first. I dedicate this paper to Philippe Michel, who introduced me to the literature on differential games.     

A Microeconometric Test of Alternative Stochastic Theories of Risky Choice

The random preference, Fechner (or white noise), and constant error (or tremble) models of stochastic choice under risk are compared. Various combinations of these approaches are used with expected utility and rank-dependent theory. The resulting models are estimated in a random effects framework using experimental data from two samples of 46 subjects who each faced 90 pairwise choice problems. The best fitting model uses the random preference approach with a tremble mechanism, in conjunction with rank-dependent theory. As subjects gain experience, trembles become less frequent and there is less deviation from behaviour consistent with expected utility theory.     

Stochastic Evolution of Rules for Playing Finite Normal Form Games

The evolution of boundedly rational rules for playing normal form games is studied within stationary environments of stochastically changing games. Rules are viewed as algorithms prescribing strategies for the different normal form games that arise. It is shown that many of the “folk results” of evolutionary game theory, typically obtained with a fixed game and fixed strategies, carry over to the present environments. The results are also related to some recent experiments on rules and games.      

Limit theorems for Dempster's rule of combination

I show that Dempster's Rule of combination can be represented in the theory of Markov chains and use this representation to derive limit theorems concerning the long term effect of updating belief with Dempster's rule.     

Testing Descriptive Utility Theories: Violations of Stochastic Dominance and Cumulative Independence

Choices between gambles show systematic violations of stochastic dominance. For example, most people choose ($6, .05; $91, .03; $99, .92) over ($6, .02; $8, .03; $99, .95), violating dominance. Choices also violate two cumulative independence conditions: (1) If S = (z, r; x, p; y, q) R = (z, r; x, p; y, q) then S = (x, r; y, p + q) R = (x, r + p; y, q). (2) If S = (x, p; y, q; z, r) R = (x, p; y, q; z, r) then S = (x, p + q; y, r) R = (x, p; y, q + r), where 0 < z < x < x < y < y < y < z.Violations contradict any utility theory satisfying transivity, outcome monotonicity, coalescing, and comonotonic independence. Because rank-and sign-dependent utility theories, including cumulative prospect theory (CPT), satisfy these properties, they cannot explain these results.However, the configural weight model of Birnbaum and McIntosh (1996) predicted the observed violations of stochastic dominance, cumulative independence, and branch independence. This model assumes the utility of a gamble is a weighted average of outcomes\' utilities, where each configural weight is a function of the rank order of the outcome\'s value among distinct values and that outcome\'s probability. The configural weight, TAX model with the same number of parameters as CPT fit the data of most individuals better than the model of CPT.     

试论俄语随机词的特征与功能

报刊俄语中大量出现的随机词是言语的词汇单位,它的自造性、使用的一次性、对上下文的依赖性以及修辞功能上的强大表现力,使它与规范词有着本质上的区别。同时,它也是变革中的俄罗斯社会政治、经济形势、社会风气在现代俄语中的生动反映。分析和研究随机词,对于我们学好俄语、熟悉和了解俄罗斯国情文化不但具有一定的理论意义,而且具有较大的实践意义。     

The effect of probabilistic demands on the structure of cost functions

Firms that provide capacity to meet randomly fluctuating demand typically will not be producing on the efficient frontier of their production possibilities sets. Consequently, the standard dual theory of cost and production is inapplicable. This article provides an alternative that leaves most of the theory intact provided that firms are viewed as producing the probability of providing service rather than an explicit produced output. As an application we show that for a telecommunications firm facing a network externality it is quite possible to find something that looks like negative marginal cost.The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions of GTE or any of its subsidiaries. I'd like to thank Kip Viscusi, Dave Salant, Glenn Woroch, and Larry Cole for various comments. To Roger Tobin, my coauthor on other parts of this study, I give a particular thanks.     

北京主导优势产业链发展战略

本文分析了北京工业发展的优势和劣势以及当前面临的主要问题,在此基础上提出了未来北京工业发展的新思路。作者认为,北京工业发展应面向京津冀和环渤海地区,实行大工业、大市场的一体化战略,即适当控制和强化那些具有突出优势的核心部分,而甩掉或转移扩散那些不具有优势或优势不突出的非核心部分,打造一体化的开放式跨区域主导优势产业链。当前,应着重打造八条一体化的开放式产业链。     

《德国民法典》的演进及其分析

随着社会政治、经济、文化的发展 ,施行百年的《德国民法典》的内容在很大程度上都有所改动 ,修改最多的主要集中在债权部分和家庭法部分。其发展变化的主要特点是 :国家干预的加强 ,契约自由原则、所有权自由原则受到限制 ,平等的倾向在家庭关系中进一步加强 ,整个法典朝着更有利于市场经济的需要而发展。这种变化规律对我国民法典的制定有重要启示     

快速发展的北京物流配送业

文章提出在新世纪快速发展的物流配送行业将成为社会前进、经济发展的重要基础性产业。本文从物流配送业的历史沿革和国内外的发展状况 ,分析了 2 1世纪的企业竞争是供应链与供应链之间的竞争 ,论述了北京市物流配送业快速发展的有利条件、广阔前景及影响其发展的因素。     

艺术画作授权产业价值链分析

创意产业的蓬勃发展,创意经济的持续增长,创意潜能的有效激发离不开创意产业链的形成和完善。本文选择创意产业中的典型——艺术画作授权产业为研究对象,探讨了艺术画作授权产业的经济和社会价值,以及该产业链的构成。分析艺术画作授权产业链的价值增值和传递,是对创意产业链研究的有益尝试。