The politics of the Digital Single Market: culture vs. competition vs. copyright

This paper examines the implications for European music culture of the European Union’s (EU) Digital Single Market strategy. It focuses on the regulatory framework being created for the management of copyright policy, and in particular the role played by collective management organisations (CMOs or collecting societies). One of the many new opportunities created by digitalisation has been the music streaming services. These depend on consumers being able to access music wherever they are, but such a system runs counter to the management of rights on a national basis and through collecting organisations which act as monopolies within their own territories. The result has been ‘geo-blocking’. The EU has attempted to resolve this problem in a variety of ways, most recently in a Directive designed to reform the CMOs. In this paper, we document these various efforts, showing them to be motivated by a deep-seated and persisting belief in the capacity of ‘competition’ to resolve problems that, we argue, actually lie elsewhere – in copyright policy itself. The result is that the EU’s intervention fails to address its core concern and threatens the diversity of European music culture by rewarding those who are already commercially successful.     

Overcoming medication refusal using a patient-centered approach

The refusal of psychotropic medication is a challenge faced by many healthcare providers when treating patients with mental illness. Controversy surrounds medication refusal because some mental health professionals believe that psychiatric patients should be forced to take medications for the safety of the general public, while patients are often acutely aware of potential lifelong adverse side effects and are sometimes reluctant to comply. The proposed alternative to this problem begins with developing the patient-provider relationship through a patient-centered approach. This approach emphasizes the individual needs of patients and creates opportunities for input from patients about their care, which helps form relationships of mutual trust and respect between patients and providers. This article explores the literature to: (1) understand some of the challenges and controversies involved in patient medication refusal from a clinical and societal level; (2) identify some issues in a patient-centered approach; and (3) make some brief clinical and policy recommendations that might help to bring about an increase in the use of patient-centered care. Hopefully, as efforts are made toward a patient-centered approach, increased psychotropic medication adherence and decreased medication coercion will result as providers listen and act upon the needs of their patients.     

Need,well‐being and outcomes: the development of policy‐thinking for children's services 1989–2004

This paper describes how government policy thinking about the well‐being of children and young people developed between the Children Act 1989 and the Children Act 2004. These two Acts are milestone statements about how services to children in England and Wales should be delivered. It is an account informed by the author's own experience as a government adviser on children's social care over much of this period and supporting documentation. It traces the strands of government policy thinking about how to deliver services for children from children in need to the articulation of the five Every Child Matters outcomes. It argues that attempts to achieve coordinated service planning for children and young people played a significant role in the formulation of shared objectives and the articulation of child outcomes. However, it argues that looking at real outcomes exposes how children in the UK do relatively badly compared with other rich nations. It questions whether we can realistically expect our services to deliver significantly improved outcomes given the impact of enduring inequality in our society. This paper is dedicated to the memory of David Lambert CBE, former Assistant Chief Inspector of the Social Services Inspectorate in London, who died suddenly on 7 October 2010. He lent me articles to assist me in writing this paper.     

Chronic Child Abuse: The Characteristics and Careers of Children Caught in the Child Protection System

The introduction of the Quality Protects initiative in Englandand the focus on performance management has challenged socialservices departments to examine the systems, processes and outcomesfor children who have their name on a child protection register.Research indicates that approximately one-quarter of the situationsin which children are registered could be described as chronic—thatis, they remain on the child protection register for significantperiods of time, experience more than one period of registrationor suffer a further incident of significant harm whilst subjectto a child protection plan. In this article, the findings froma research study conducted into this group of vulnerable childrenare reported, focusing on the characteristics of the childrenand their families, and their careers in the child protectionsystem. The paper concludes with observations about the weakconceptualization of performance management and the need torecognize the complexity of the factors that influence children’scareers in the child protection system.     

On the existence of linear trend free block designs

We present a class of counerexamples for a conjecture on the existence or linear trend free block designs we will also prove a considerably weakened version of this conjecture which will determine all combinations of designs parmetres for which the class of linear trend free block designs is non empty.     

Does product complexity matter for competition in experimental retail markets?

We describe a first experiment on whether product complexity affects competition and consumers in retail markets. We are unable to detect a significant effect of product complexity on prices, except insofar as the demand elasticity for complex products is higher. However, there is qualified evidence that complex products have the potential to induce consumers to buy more than they would otherwise. In this sense, consumer exploitability in quantities cannot be ruled out. We also find evidence for shaping effects: consumers’ preferences are shaped by past experience with prices, and firms may in principle exploit this to sell more.     

Comment on “Constrained Optimization Approaches to Estimation of Structural Models”

We revisit the comparison of mathematical programming with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) and nested fixed point (NFXP) algorithms for estimating structural dynamic models by Su and Judd (2012). Their implementation of the nested fixed point algorithm used successive approximations to solve the inner fixed point problem (NFXP‐SA). We redo their comparison using the more efficient version of NFXP proposed by Rust (1987), which combines successive approximations and Newton–Kantorovich iterations to solve the fixed point problem (NFXP‐NK). We show that MPEC and NFXP are similar in speed and numerical performance when the more efficient NFXP‐NK variant is used.     

Impatience versus Incentives

This paper studies the dynamics of long‐term contracts in repeated principal–agent relationships with an impatient agent. Despite the absence of exogenous uncertainty, Pareto‐optimal dynamic contracts generically oscillate between favoring the principal and favoring the agent.