The Body in Biography

Abstract

This paper takes as point of departure current attempts at understanding what the notion of an embodied subjectivity might mean for life writing. It begins by providing a psychoanalytic perspective on how subjectivity is related to the body, describing the processes by which subjectivity emerges out of bodily drives and showing how the emergence of the subject is coterminous with the emergence of language. Having identified the processes by which subjectivity, language and body are related, the paper examines the writing of the body in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, drawing attention to the stylistic means by which bodily drives are configured. It concludes by suggesting that because the body is present in writing not as substance but as a system of articulation, the only way in which the biographer is able to convey the embodied life of the subject is through what Nietzsche calls the ‘felt text’.     

Experimental evidence on case-based decision theory

This paper starts out from the proposition that case-based decision theory (CBDT) is an appropriate tool to explain human decision behavior in situations of structural ignorance. Although the developers of CBDT suggest its reality adequacy, CBDT has not yet been tested empirically very often, especially not in repetitive decision situations. Therefore, our main objective is to analyse the decision behavior of subjects in a repeated-choice experiment by comparing the explanation power of CBDT to reinforcement learning and to classical decision criteria under uncertainty namely maximin, maximax, and pessimism-optimism. Our findings substantiate a predominant significantly higher validity of CBDT compared to the classical criteria and to reinforcement learning. For this reason, the experimental results confirm the suggested reality adequacy of CBDT in repetitive decision situations of structural ignorance.     

Zur Struktur des Marktes für Abschlussprüfungen

This comment refers to the paper ofStefani/Bleibtreu. In their model they combine two important topics of audit research: Auditor’s independence and audit market’s concentration tendencies. The objective of their paper is to demonstrate that abandoning non audit services might have negative impacts on auditors’ competitive behavior.

This comment addresses the following features of the model:

• The paper’s relevance, because it addresses aspects of the audit market structure, which have been so far neglected in the political discussion on the EU-level.
• The way of modeling different auditors’ offered product portfolios and auditors’ cost structures.
• The implications of the paper’s results, because only very few papers make use of analytical models for analyzing the audit market.

     

Cross-border mergers and the cross-border effect: the case of the automotive supply industry

In this paper we examine stock price reactions to cross-border mergers and acquisitions in a particular industry, the automotive supply industry. We show that cross-border transactions entail a pronounced value creation for the acquiring shareholders and that this value creation also holds for transcontinental transactions, which to our knowledge have not been investigated so far. Splitting the sample by different types of targets indicates that the value creation mainly stems from takeovers of subsidiaries. By examining differences between national and international takeovers in cross-section, we sustain the recent evidence of a negative cross-border effect (i.e., cross-border mergers and acquisitions entail lower announcement returns than national ones).

Without-replacement sampling for particle methods on finite state spaces

Combinatorial estimation is a new area of application for sequential Monte Carlo methods. We use ideas from sampling theory to introduce new without-replacement sampling methods in such discrete settings. These without-replacement sampling methods allow the addition of merging steps, which can significantly improve the resulting estimators. We give examples showing the use of the proposed methods in combinatorial rare-event probability estimation and in discrete state-space models.     

INFORMATION ACQUISITION IN INTERDEPENDENT VALUE AUCTIONS

We consider an auction environment with interdependent values. Each bidder can learn her payoff type through costly information acquisition. We contrast the socially optimal decision to acquire information with the equilibrium solution in which each agent has to privately bear the cost of information acquisition. In the context of the generalized Vickrey‐Clarke‐Groves mechanism, we establish that the equilibrium level exceeds the socially optimal level of information with positive interdependence. The individual decisions to acquire information are strategic substitutes. The difference between the equilibrium and the efficient level of information acquisition is increasing in the interdependence of the bidders' valuations and decreasing in the number of informed bidders. (JEL: C72, C73, D43, D83)     

Young children returning home from care: the birth parents' perspective

While a wide range of literature exists on the experiences of children in foster care or adoption, much less is known about children who return home from care to their birth parents. This paper focuses on the perspectives of a small sample of birth parents of young children who returned home from care. It draws on findings from the Northern Ireland Care Pathways and Outcomes Study that has been following a population ( n  = 374) of children who were under 5 years and in care in Northern Ireland on the 31st of March 2000. As part of this study, interviews were conducted with the foster parents of 55 children, the adoptive parents of 51 children and the birth parents of nine children who had returned home from care. The paper explores the birth parents' views on how they coped while their child was in care, how they were coping after the child had returned home and how their child was faring at home. Results revealed that these parents, and their children, were experiencing multiple difficulties and struggled to cope after the children had returned home.     

大陆或社会空间:全球强国关系中来自亚洲众多文化的商人和流动人口

本文首先论述了普遍认同的分期的传统,及其对现代分析性学术成就的影响,并探讨了历史事件/发展的连贯性及对长期历史发展的推动力;其次,通过描述中国和下撒哈拉非洲、地中海之间的文化交流,分析了复杂的欧亚非三大陆之间的跨文化世界;第三,关注了某些宏观区域的经济资源及由此产生的经济往来;在此基础上,第四,把欧洲人眼中所谓“西印度群岛”这样一个“奇异财富”地区的形象与当地某些产品联系在一起,这些产品经过欧洲人的改动,似乎成了欧洲本土的产品。在货物交易的同时,在跨太平洋人口流动制度的最初两个阶段也发生了人的交易;第五,亚洲文化在20世纪的后半叶进入了又一个崭新的上升时期:从印度后殖民学术成就的产生开始,在跨太平洋人口流动制度的第三阶段,为数众多的男女流动人口迁居北美,只有少量移至欧洲社会。一些亚洲国家的工业化迫使大西洋世界的观察家们逐渐形成新的观点;最后并就亚洲实际的流动人口和政策同在亚欧社会工业化时期欧洲的和来自欧洲的流动人口做了比较。