Finite Alternating-Move Arbitration Schemes and the Equal Area Solution

We start by considering the Alternate Strike (AS) scheme, a real-life arbitration scheme where two parties select an arbitrator by alternately crossing off at each round one name from a given panel of arbitrators. We find out that the AS scheme is not invariant to “bad” alternatives. We then consider another alternating-move scheme, the Voting by Alternating Offers and Vetoes (VAOV) scheme, which is invariant to bad alternatives. We fully characterize the subgame perfect equilibrium outcome sets of these above two schemes in terms of the rankings of the parties over the alternatives only. We also identify some of the typical equilibria of these above two schemes. We then analyze two additional alternating-move schemes in which players’ current proposals have to either honor or enhance their previous proposals. We show that the first scheme’s equilibrium outcome set coincides with that of the AS scheme, and the equilibrium outcome set of the second scheme coincides with that of the VAOV scheme. Finally, it turns out that all schemes’ equilibrium outcome sets converge to the Equal Area solution’s outcome of cooperative bargaining problem, if the alternatives are distributed uniformly over the comprehensive utility possibility set and as the number of alternatives tends to infinity. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C72.     

从州级官员设置的变动看唐代中央与地方的关系

本文通过刺史品阶的变动、别驾的置废、地方增员与中央减员的矛盾三个视角考察了唐代州级官员品阶、职位、员额设置的变动情况,进而探讨了在这些变动因素的背后所体现的唐代中央与地方的关系。贞观年间提升中、下州刺史品阶的改革,是唐初中央调整与地方关系政策的一项,体现了中央对地方的重视。别驾一职频繁的置废,表明了中央在对地方官职取舍问题上的矛盾态度,中央与地方的关系通过这种取舍性的运动,更为紧密地联系在一起。唐前期地方员额的增员与唐后期中央对地方员额的减员改革之间的矛盾,也构成了唐代中央与地方关系中的重要一环。     

社会工作实验室的建设原则与功能设置

社会工作实验室的建设在社会工作专业学生的培养中具有不可或缺的作用，但在建设的过程却缺乏统一的伦理标准与技术标准，对功能的设置也缺乏经验。针对这一问题，本文从社会工作实验室的建设原则与功能设置两方面进行了探讨与总结。     

Divide-the-Dollar Game Revisited

In the Divide-the-Dollar (DD) game, two players simultaneously make demands to divide a dollar. Each player receives his demand if the sum of the demands does not exceed one, a payoff of zero otherwise. Note that, in the latter case, both parties are punished severely. A major setback of DD is that each division of the dollar is a Nash equilibrium outcome. Observe that, when the sum of the two demands x and y exceeds one, it is as if Player 1's demand x (or his offer (1−x) to Player 2) suggests that Player 2 agrees to λ_x < 1 times his demand y so that Player 1's demand and Player 2's modified demand add up to exactly one; similarly, Player 2's demand y (or his offer (1−y) to Player 1) suggests that Player 1 agrees to λ_yx so that λ_yx+y = 1. Considering this fact, we change DD's payoff assignment rule when the sum of the demands exceeds one; here in this case, each player's payoff becomes his demand times his λ; i.e., each player has to make the sacrifice that he asks his opponent to make. We show that this modified version of DD has an iterated strict dominant strategy equilibrium in which each player makes the egalitarian demand 1/2. We also provide a natural N-person generalization of this procedure. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

《秋菊打官司》人物形象分析

电影《秋菊打官司》成功地塑造了秋菊和王善堂的人物形象,但是在表层和深层的人物性格体现上他们却有着巨大的区别：作为叛逆者,秋菊坚持用法律手段维护自身权益的背后却隐藏着对父权制度的守护,作为村长王善堂身上则具有政治和宗族的双重身份,正是在这种身份下,影片的矛盾得以精彩地展开。     

先秦盟誓的种类及仪程

先秦盟誓依照参加人员可分为天子与诸侯间、诸侯国间、诸侯国君与本国卿大夫间、诸侯与少数民族间、诸侯国君与国人间、卿大夫与卿大夫间等种类的盟誓 ;依照盟誓性质可分为政治性、军事性和经济性等种类 ;依照盟誓的仪式可分为血盟和非血盟两种 ;还有伪盟、重盟、强盟、改盟、和匮盟等情况。盟誓的仪程则可分为征会与定期、排序、商讨盟辞、歃血、拜盟等 11个程序     

New Governance and the Case of Activation Policies: Comparing Experiences in Denmark and the Netherlands

This article explores the importance of new forms of governance in active labour market policies (activation) in two countries: Denmark and the Netherlands. Drawing on research with key stakeholders in these countries, we analyse how new governance, and particularly processes of contracting-out and localization, have found expression in recent reforms to activation. We conclude that localization and contracting-out may have a future role to play in the development of more locally responsive and individually focused services. But both countries have encountered problems in promoting joined-up services through local jobcentres, while contracting-out has not always led to the tailored, individually focused services envisaged by policy-makers. In both countries, there are also concerns that the restriction of the Public Employment Service to a 'gatekeeping and signposting' role will lead to inconsistencies in the quality of services, exposing the most disadvantaged to greater social risk.     

Why do women interact with their parents more often than men? The demonstration effect vs. the biological effect

Neuroscientists have shown that females are biologically more caring than males. In this paper, two empirical strategies are applied to examine the validity of using gender difference as the evidence for the argument. The first approach is to compare visits to parents between single females and single males. The second approach is to investigate whether females evaluate children as old-age security to render them more important in their lives. The conclusions of these two approaches do not support the position.     

Strategic uncertainty,coordination failure and emergence: A game theory study on agency‐structure interactions

In the social sciences there is a long standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior. Structurationists like Giddens think of individuals' agency and collective features as two sides of the same coin while emergentists including Archer and Elder‐Vass claim that structurationists are blurring an important ontological distinction——they argue for effective social analysis, we should think of structures and individuals as different things because emergence happens when the properties of the collective are not reducible to the properties of the parts that constitute them. This paper contributes to the agency‐structure debate by showing how production and reproduction of emergent properties of social groups sharing same normative commitments (norm circles) can be empirically studied using two behavioral game theory experiments, adding a previously neglected insight that strategic uncertainty can lead to coordination failures of individual behaviors within norm circles, manifested as unintended outcomes of interdependent actions that are difficult to predict. Here the synchronic relation between the unpredictable collective outcomes of each game round and agential reactions of the participants to them defines emergence——the previous outcomes are diachronic inputs but they appear in the new outcome only through their effects on the individual decisions.     

Loss Aversion and Bargaining

We consider bargaining situations where two players evaluate outcomes with reference-dependent utility functions, analyzing the effect of differing levels of loss aversion on bargaining outcomes. We find that as with risk aversion, increasing loss aversion for a player leads to worse outcomes for that player in bargaining situations. An extension of Nash's axioms is used to define a solution for bargaining problems with exogenous reference points. Using this solution concept we endogenize the reference points into the model and find a unique solution giving reference points and outcomes that satisfy two reasonable properties, which we predict would be observed in a steady state. The resulting solution also emerges in two other approaches, a strategic (non-cooperative) approach using Rubinstein's (1982) alternating offers model and a dynamic approach in which we find that even under weak assumptions, outcomes and reference points converge to the steady state solution from any non-equilibrium state.     

公众参与社区志愿服务的影响因素与对策——以湖北省H市的15个社区为例

本文以湖北省H市为个案,通过描述和分析公众参与社区志愿服务的影响因素,主要从社会层面的组织环境与社会环境和个体层面的参与能力两方面进行研究,在此基础上探讨如何使公众更好地参与到社区志愿服务活动中,并在构建和谐社会工作中起到更为积极的作用。     

实质的经济:《礼物》和《大转型》的反功利主义经济人类学

莫斯和波兰尼在《礼物》和《大转型》中开创的经济人类学视角为反思当前状况提供了思想资源,但20世纪以英美人类学者为主的解读偏离了两位作者的真实意图并忽略了两者的相通性。这包括：对功利主义的形式经济概念及在此基础上确立的礼物与商品对立的反对;财富的观念和货币的形式性交换是对社会的实质性交换,即存在于社会深层结构和心智系统中的交换的组织和体现;莫斯和波兰尼在探索现代社会和个人观念的诞生问题上,可以构成互补。最后,波兰尼关于“双向运动”“虚拟商品”“嵌入”的观点以及莫斯关于“总体呈现”的论述,都应置于他们对社会的整体性和实质性的坚持中来理解。莫斯和波兰尼的论述拓展了个人和社会的概念边界,提供了对个体自由和市场的不同理解,他们提出了一种以社会整体性为基础的关于“经济”的多元概念,二者共同奠定了实质主义经济意义上的经济人类学基础。     

An Empirical Comparison of Probabilistic Coalition Structure Theories in 3-Person Sidepayment Games

This article reports a comparative test of the central-union theory vis-à-vis several other game-theoretic solution concepts in 3-person sidepayment games. Based on a laboratory experiment, this comparison utilizes nine games in characteristic function form. The solution concepts under test include the equal excess model, the Myerson–Shapley solution, the kernel, and two variants of the central-union theory (CU-1 and CU-2). With regard to the player's payoffs, results show that the CU-1, CU-2, kernel, and equal excess theories have essentially equal predictive accuracy and that all of these are more accurate than Myerson–Shapley. When the solution concepts are extended and coalition structure probability predictions are incorporated in the test, one version of the central-union theory (CU-2) is overall more accurate than the other solutions.     

“京西太平鼓”史迹考索

列入国家级非物质文化遗产名录的"京西太平鼓",是我国北方太平鼓的一个地域性分支。唐代以前的几种舞蹈与它具有渊源关系,直接的源头则是宋代定名的"太平鼓"。明清大量诗文记录了北京太平鼓的兴盛,证明这种民间艺术已经从农村走进城市。受清朝道光年间危害城市治安事件的牵连,太平鼓表演逐渐从北京退回郊区农村。今人主张的清末才由北京传入京西之说,则与史实大相径庭。隐含在古籍中的许多重要史料,尚需进一步发掘和研究。     

The impact of health insurance cost-sharing method on healthcare utilisation in China

In current Chinese health insurance programmes, there are two types of cost-sharing methods: the time-of-service copayment policy and the reimbursement policy. In contrast to the copayment participants, reimbursement participants need to pay for all medical expenses in advance. We study the effect of the reimbursement policy on the utilisation of healthcare services in China. The theoretical analysis indicates that the medical consumption of low income households will be less than the optimal consumption level when enrolled in a reimbursement programme instead of a copayment programme. Empirically, using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we find that the total inpatient expenditure of the reimbursement participants is 12.7% lower than that of copayment enrolees, and the reimbursement arrangement negatively impacts low-income and rural populations. Therefore, reimbursement participants, those who are financially constrained, are more likely to suffer the up-front payment burden and finally reduce their healthcare needs.     

在现代社会学与后现代社会理论之间——米尔斯的《社会学的想像力》再解读

在《社会学的想像力》一书中，米尔斯对美国传统社会学理论和研究方法上的抽象和僵化进行了全面的批判，在批判的过程中，提出了许多带有后现代色彩的新的理论取向和方法论取向。在对人类历史和当代的看法上，在对宏大理论的批判上，在对实证主义的态度上，在对学科分化的理解上，以及对价值倾向的偏好上，米尔斯都表现出很强的后现代转向。然而他对现代社会学的批判是立足于古典社会学传统之上的，并没有完全放弃现代性，这使他的思想有别于纯粹的后现代主义，处于现代社会学与后现代社会理论之间。这样，通过对《社会学的想像力》进行再解读，似乎可以把后现代社会理论和现代社会学在逻辑上连接起来，表明两者之间没有不可逾越的鸿沟。     

Characteristic properties of FPTP systems

In this article, we model FPTP systems as social preference rules and give two characterizations. We show that a social preference rule is an FPTP system if, and only if, it satisfies the axioms of subset consistency, district consistency, subset cancellation, and district cancellation. The second characterization consists of the axioms of subset consistency, subset anonymity, neutrality, topsonlyness, Pareto optimality, district consistency and district cancellation. The characterizations give us an opportunity to compare the characteristic properties of FPTP systems to the characteristic properties that we found for list systems of proportional representation (list PR systems) in Hout et al. (Social Choice and Welfare, 27:459–475, 2006), where we modelled those systems also as social preference rules. We find that consistency and anonymity distinguish list PR systems from FPTP systems. On the other hand, it is district cancellation that distinguishes FPTP systems from list PR systems.     

浅析新农村建设中的思想道德水平提升

农村思想道德体系是社会主义思想道德体系的主要组成部分,新农村建设同样对我国农村的思想道德水平提出了要求,大力提升农村思想道德教育水平是构建和谐社会道德体系的重要前提,同时也是为新农村建设提供强大精神支柱的重要举措。     

Sequential decision making without independence: a new conceptual approach

This paper presents a critical reflection on dynamic consistency as commonly used in economics and decision theory, and on the difficulty to test it experimentally. It distinguishes between the uses of the term dynamic consistency in order to characterize two different properties: the first accounts for the neutrality of individual preferences towards the timing of resolution of uncertainty whereas the second guarantees that a strategy chosen at the beginning of a sequential decision problem is immune to any reevaluation and will effectively be implemented from then on in the decision problem. Although these two properties are equivalent under expected utility (EU), this is not the case under non-EU. Building on the possible characteristics of individual dynamic preferences under risk, this paper proposes a conceptual categorization, that is experimentally testable, of possible sequential decision making behaviors of non-EU maximizers.