Fully-Revealing Equilibria of Multiple-Sender Signaling and Screening Models

Models of incomplete information have played a major role in the fields of political science and political economy. The models have almost exclusively been signaling models, and their substantive focus is frequently on situations in which the extensive form is not dictated by institutional requirements or procedures. We explore the relation between multiple-sender signaling games and the corresponding screening or mechanism design games without transfers and establish an equivalence result. If there is a fully-revealing equilibrium in the signaling game there is also a full-information optimal mechanism that yields the principal’s optimal policy in every state. The converse, that fully-revealing equilibria exist in the signaling game if a full-information optimal mechanism exists, is true if and only if the mechanism involves only the selection of policies that are optimal for some belief about the state. We also present two straightforward sufficient conditions for the existence of full-information optimal mechanisms. When either holds, fully-revealing equilibria in the signaling and screening games exist. The perceived advantage of the signaling over the screening approach – that no commitment by the principal is assumed – may be over-stated as flexibility in specifying off the path beliefs can mimic commitment.     

RANK, PERFORMANCE, AND MOBILITY IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL GROUPING

Because the stratified levels in schools and school systems bear widely accepted symbolic statuses, students' positions in the hierarchy may influence the pattern of their educational careers, independently of their scholastic achievement. This article measures the effects of the rank of students' reading groups in first grade and their first-grade achievement on assignment to a reading group at the beginning of second grade. Two patterns are discovered: one in which students' reading-group levels in second grade depend on their first-grade positions, and a second in which achievement appears to be the criterion used for placement. However, examination of the composition of first- and second-grade reading groups reveals that in both cases, teachers attempt to reduce the heterogeneity of low- and middle-reading groups between first and second grade.     

Different worlds of motoring: choice, constraint and risk in household consumption

The article shows how the old economic variable of income can be related to spatial location and used to reinforce recent revisionism in sociology which questions the automatic link between consumption and identity. The diversity of motoring experience is demonstrated through a case study of motoring in inner and outer London which draws on a variety of resources, including interviews from two London boroughs, survey evidence on household expenditure and other official statistics. The analysis shows how income and space variably define household motoring experience as one of choice or constraint and risk. The end result is a cultural economy analysis that shows how motoring sustains multiple, overlapping identities in different worlds of enabling and enforced consumption which connect with production.     

Empowered or over-powered? The real experiences of local participation in the UK's New Deal for Communities

The notion of ‘participation’ has growing currencyat many levels of social policy in the UK where the Labour governmentuses it to denote the engagement of ‘local people’in decision-making about the services and structures which affecttheir daily lives. In particular, local participation is givenas the distinctive feature of the UK government's flagship initiativefor neighbourhood renewal, the New Deal for Communities, butthere is little known about what this means in practice forthe ‘local’ people it affects.     

Patterns of Giving in South Africa

Abstact This paper reflects on the results of a national quantitative survey on giving in South Africa. It explores the extent and character of giving; who gives, to whom, with what intention? The survey results revealed that South Africa is richly resourced with a diverse and multicultural spectrum of giving behaviors, which are commonplace in everyday life. The spectrum of giving behaviors is so diverse in shape and form that it contradicts many of the basic assumptions of the philanthropic literature, which locate the act of giving primarily in the domain of the wealthy and powerful.     

Geometry in Canonical Correlations

In this article, a useful proposition relating the canonical correlations in multi-way layout to the singular values of a specific matrix is proved and also a geometrical explanation of canonical correlations as an angle between subspaces is given.     

Perspectives on Job Stress in the Serials Information World

Abstract

Adam Chesler describes his experiences and observations of job stress in the serials publishing industry. While stresses, such as the challenges of supervision have always existed, others are new, such as serial publishers scrambling to adapt service and pricing models for providing Internet content. Advice is offered on coping with these stresses.     

‘Escaping’ managed labour migration: worker exit as precarious migrant agency

ABSTRACT

This article narrows in on the mundane yet extraordinary events surrounding migrant farm workers’ decisions to leave their state-approved employment and to seek a better life in Canada outside of state-managed circulatory labour migration. In so doing, this research contributes to conceptualisations of precarity, and of precarious status in particular, that are beginning to recognise its effects not only on workers’ economic survival, but also the more ordinary daily conditions surrounding workers’ sense belonging and personal autonomy. In their refusal to accept the terms of their contractual circulatory labour migration agreements through what is conceptualised here as an act of ‘escape’, workers claim a space of belonging that contradicts the precarity of their formal citizenship status. In carving out a space in which they may perform autonomy and self-determination in daily life, however, this rejection of contingent citizenship status intensifies the precarious material conditions governing workers’ relationship to the state.