The earnings of men and remarriage

Focusing on the effects of men's earnings, this paper analyzes remarriage. Previous empirical research has not established what theoretical aspects of men's earnings are important. Here, data for Wisconsin high school graduates that include male respondents' Social Security earnings history are analyzed. The results indicate that absolute earnings, earnings instability, and earnings relative to peers have minimal effects on a man's probability of remarriage, but that permanent income positively affects remarriage. However, studies of marital disruption often find permanent income is not as important as relative earnings measures. Concluding remarks speculate about the meaning of these contrasting findings for the economics of marriage.     

Adolescent Girls' Alcohol Use as a Risk Factor for Relationship Violence

This research examined the relation between female adolescents' general alcohol use and their experience of relationship violence. This relation was examined both cross‐sectionally and longitudinally, controlling for the proximal (i.e., situational) effects of alcohol use. One hundred and six female high school students reported on their experiences of physical violence and sexual coercion by boyfriends, general patterns of alcohol use, victimization experiences while drinking, and hypothesized covariates including demographic and relationship variables and illicit drug use. Variables were assessed at 2 time points 4 months apart. Results indicated that general alcohol use was related to victimization both cross‐sectionally and longitudinally, but different findings emerged for different forms of victimization (physical‐only victimization vs. both physical and sexual victimization).     

Power,policy and paperwork: The bureaucratic representation of interests

This article compares how five government documents evaluate a proposed dam in Central Arizona. One of the consequences of this dam would be to force a small Native American community from their ancestral land. Spanning almost forty years, these documents illustrate changes in how a federal agency legitimated these projects and their negative social impacts to different audiences. These records are used here to argue for the importance of careful textual analysis of bureaucratic paperwork, as an additional form of understanding the multiple dimensions of social, economic, and political power over disempowered groups.     

Is There a Disability Culture? A Syncretisation of Three Possible World Views

Is there a disability culture? Or are disabled people simply individuals-or at best a socio/political minority group-striving to fit in to the dominant culture (whatever that is)? The author challenges Lois Bragg's contention that Deaf Culture exists, but not Disability Culture. The paper first traces historically the different conceptualisations of culture, beginning with E. B. Tylor's Primitive Cultures (1871) through to post-modern accounts by Kuper, Giroux and McLaren. Using a wide range of these concepts, three possible world views of disability culture are developed: Culture as Historical/Linguistic, Culture as Socio/Political, and Culture as Personal/Aesthetic. From these alternatives, a macro-sociological framework is set forth to evaluate each of these world views, as well as a set of ethical questions to consider in choosing which one might be most robust. The paper concludes with a proposal for a syncretized view of disability culture and asserts that the experience of disability culture is a thriving cross-cultural phenomenon which knows no national boundaries-and in particular, is not limited to Martha's Vineyard and American Deaf people.     

The Road to Gang Membership: Characteristics of Male Gang and Nongang Members from Ages 10 to 14

This study examined the stability of belonging to a gang in early adolescence, the behaviour profiles, family characteristics, and friendships of nongang and gang members. The subjects in the present study were originally part of a larger sample of boys. One hundred and forty‐two boys who had a complete data set at ages 11, 12, 13, and 14 were selected for the present study. Loglinear analyses indicated that gang membership was stable from ages 13 to 14, but not at earlier ages. Boys were divided into three groups: stable gang members (children who belonged to a gang at ages 13 and 14); unstable gang members (children who belonged to a gang at either age 13 or 14) and nongang members. Repeated analyses of variance indicated that stable gang members had significantly higher scores than nongang members on teacher ratings of fighting behaviour, hyperactivity, inattention and oppositional behaviour, and self‐reported delinquent activities (drug and alcohol use, stealing and vandalism). Peers rated gang members as more aggressive than nongang members. The results are discussed from a developmental perspective.     

On Loss Aversion in Bimatrix Games

In this article three different types of loss aversion equilibria in bimatrix games are studied. Loss aversion equilibria are Nash equilibria of games where players are loss averse and where the reference points—points below which they consider payoffs to be losses—are endogenous to the equilibrium calculation. The first type is the fixed point loss aversion equilibrium, introduced in Shalev (2000; Int. J. Game Theory 29(2):269) under the name of ‘myopic loss aversion equilibrium.’ There, the players’ reference points depend on the beliefs about their opponents’ strategies. The second type, the maximin loss aversion equilibrium, differs from the fixed point loss aversion equilibrium in that the reference points are only based on the carriers of the strategies, not on the exact probabilities. In the third type, the safety level loss aversion equilibrium, the reference points depend on the values of the own payoff matrices. Finally, a comparative statics analysis is carried out of all three equilibrium concepts in 2 × 2 bimatrix games. It is established when a player benefits from his opponent falsely believing that he is loss averse.     

Risk as Analysis and Risk as Feelings: Some Thoughts about Affect, Reason, Risk, and Rationality

Modern theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicate that there are two fundamental ways in which human beings comprehend risk. The “analytic system” uses algorithms and normative rules, such as probability calculus, formal logic, and risk assessment. It is relatively slow, effortful, and requires conscious control. The “experiential system” is intuitive, fast, mostly automatic, and not very accessible to conscious awareness. The experiential system enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution and remains today the most natural and most common way to respond to risk. It relies on images and associations, linked by experience to emotion and affect (a feeling that something is good or bad). This system represents risk as a feeling that tells us whether it is safe to walk down this dark street or drink this strange‐smelling water. Proponents of formal risk analysis tend to view affective responses to risk as irrational. Current wisdom disputes this view. The rational and the experiential systems operate in parallel and each seems to depend on the other for guidance. Studies have demonstrated that analytic reasoning cannot be effective unless it is guided by emotion and affect. Rational decision making requires proper integration of both modes of thought. Both systems have their advantages, biases, and limitations. Now that we are beginning to understand the complex interplay between emotion and reason that is essential to rational behavior, the challenge before us is to think creatively about what this means for managing risk. On the one hand, how do we apply reason to temper the strong emotions engendered by some risk events? On the other hand, how do we infuse needed “doses of feeling” into circumstances where lack of experience may otherwise leave us too “coldly rational”? This article addresses these important questions.     

Strategy-proof division with single-peaked preferences and individual endowments

We consider the problem of (re)allocating the total endowment of an infinitely divisible commodity among agents with single-peaked preferences and individual endowments. We propose an extension of the so-called uniform rule and show that it is the unique rule satisfying Pareto optimality, strategy-proofness, reversibility, and an equal-treatment condition. The resulting rule turns out to be peaks-only and individually rational: the allocation assigned by the rule depends only on the peaks of the preferences, and no agent is worse off than at his individual endowment. Received: 8 September 1995/Accepted: 30 October 1996