Toward a Strategic Foundation for Rational Expectations Equilibrium

A step toward a strategic foundation for rational expectations equilibrium is taken by considering a double auction with n buyers and m sellers with interdependent values and affiliated private information. If there are sufficiently many buyers and sellers, and their bids are restricted to a sufficiently fine discrete set of prices, then, generically, there is an equilibrium in nondecreasing bidding functions that is arbitrarily close to the unique fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium of the limit market with unrestricted bids and a continuum of agents. In particular, the large double‐auction equilibrium is almost efficient and almost fully aggregates the agents' information.     

Norovirus Dose–Response: Are Currently Available Data Informative Enough to Determine How Susceptible Humans Are to Infection from a Single Virus?

Two forms of single‐hit infection dose‐response models have previously been developed to assess available data from human feeding trials and estimate the norovirus dose‐response relationship. The mechanistic interpretations of these models include strong assumptions that warrant reconsideration: the first study includes an implicit assumption that there is no immunity to Norwalk virus among the specific study population, while the recent second study includes assumptions that such immunity could exist and that the nonimmune have no defensive barriers to prevent infection from exposure to just one virus. Both models addressed unmeasured virus aggregation in administered doses. In this work, the available data are reanalyzed using a generalization of the first model to explore these previous assumptions. It was hypothesized that concurrent estimation of an unmeasured degree of virus aggregation and important dose‐response parameters could lead to structural nonidentifiability of the model (i.e., that a diverse range of alternative mechanistic interpretations yield the same optimal fit), and this is demonstrated using the profile likelihood approach and by algebraic proof. It is also demonstrated that omission of an immunity parameter can artificially inflate the estimated degree of aggregation and falsely suggest high susceptibility among the nonimmune. The currently available data support the assumption of immunity within the specific study population, but provide only weak information about the degree of aggregation and susceptibility among the nonimmune. The probability of infection at low and moderate doses may be much lower than previously asserted, but more data from strategically designed dose‐response experiments are needed to provide adequate information.     

Are time and money equally substitutable for all commodity groups in the household’s domestic production?

Review of Economics of the Household - This article uses time-use and household expenditure data to measure the substitutability between time and money within the Beckerian household production...     

Micropolitical Dynamics of Interlingual Translation Processes in an MNC Subsidiary

Drawing on a deep single case study of a Polish subsidiary of a US‐headquartered pharmaceutical multinational company (MNC), the paper contributes to the study of power and politics in international business (IB) by advancing understanding of the interactional and processual dynamics of micropolitics in MNCs, which supplements the current dominant actor‐centred approach. The paper advances understanding of translation in IB by demonstrating how interlingual translation can be deliberately used as a management tool to pre‐empt resistance and promote managerially desired attitudes and behaviours at the subsidiary level. It highlights how hitherto largely ignored processes of interlingual translation provide an important internal forum for the exercise of power and micropolitics. The paper puts forward an emergent model of the micropolitical dynamics of interlingual translation and demonstrates how subsidiary managers can use interlingual translation to support and oppose the views of both corporate and local managerial colleagues, and thereby influence how HQ‐level decisions will be received by subsidiary‐level employees.     

On the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health between countries

This paper focuses on the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health between countries and its evolution over time, by means of population-weighted indicators. We show that rank-dependent indicators of inequality can be highly sensitive to small changes in the socioeconomic variable when estimating inequality in samples consisting of countries with large differences in population weights. Since larger countries count more than smaller countries, changes in the former tend to have bigger effects than changes in the latter. When using rank-dependent indicators, however, the sensitivity to small changes in the variable which is used for ranking can be so extreme, that the indicator may suggest trend reversals in inequality which do not really exist. An empirical study shows that this is not a freak case. The use of rank-dependent indicators may therefore produce misleading results when it comes to the measurement of population-weighted between-country inequality. We propose a simple diagnostic test to check how sensitive rank-dependent indices are to small changes in the variable used for ranking.     

Mapping forest structure and uncertainty in an urban area using leaf-off lidar data

Urban Ecosystems - Forests are important to nutrient cycling, hydrology, climate and aesthetics in urban ecosystems. Effective forest management in urban environments requires detailed data on the...     

Service(s) Marketing Research: Developments and Directions

This paper outlines the development of research in the domain of service(s) marketing from its birth as an area of academic study in the 1960s/1970s to the current time. It identifies four phases of development. Phases 1–3 relate to the period before 2004, which focuses on the development of service(s) marketing. In Phase 4, a greater focus on the concept of service (singular) – defined as the application of knowledge and skills – has resulted in developments and directions in service research that offer a different perspective through which to view more general marketing. This different perspective has explicit implications also for wider business and management research. The paper summarizes current research in this domain, which coalesces around three broad perspectives, namely, the service‐dominant logic of marketing, technology and service, and transformative service research. It concludes by outlining likely trends for service research into the future. Three interrelated directions are suggested: research on service in a changing context; research responding to academic schools of thought; and research responding to consumer trends.     

Death and survival during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda

This paper reports a quantitative study of the genocide in the prefecture of Kibuye in western Rwanda in 1994. It uses a database produced from a house-to-house survey of victims by the organization of genocide survivors, Ibuka. For a total of 59,050 victims of the genocide, data were collected on age, sex, occupation, commune of residence before the genocide, and place and date of death. An analysis conducted for one commune (Mabanza), showed that the chance of surviving the genocide was higher in those sectors of the commune where the Tutsi population did not congregate at a football stadium in Kibuye. Those who went to a mountainous area and defended themselves were almost the only Tutsi still alive in the prefecture after the month of April 1994. Other determinants of survival included age, sex, and occupation. The number of deaths each day while the killing lasted is estimated for the whole of the prefecture.     

Policy options when population growth slows: The case of Thailand

Thailand reached replacement-level fertility almost a decade ago, although there has been a lag in measuring and recognising the implications of this benchmark event. Fertility could well sink still lower. The momentum of population growth will ensure substantial further increase before the population levels off, but this is not true in all regions. For example, earlier and faster fertility decline in the North, and net outmigration, have led to a situation where some geographical and age segments of the North's population are decreasing. Population policy in Thailand since 1970 has had two major planks: to reduce fertility through an active family planning program, and to distribute population away from the large primate city of Bangkok. The paper discusses whether these policies may need to be modified as a result of the major demographic and socio economic changes that have been taking place. It also discusses the limits to population policy in terms of the likely efficacy of various measures that could be adopted, based on both an assessment of the Thailand situation and the experience of other low-fertility countries.