Unresolved Conflicts in the Regional Security System: The Case of the South Caucasus

The collapse of the USSR was accompanied by transformation of the South Caucasian latent ethnopolitical conflicts into local wars. Today the situation in the area of the conflicts is “neither war, nor peace”. Three unresolved conflicts of the South Caucasus can be considered as one of the most serious obstacles for establishing a regional security system.The article gives the general characteristics of these conflicts, the trends of their development, taking into account the time factor, and analyzes the behavioral models of the main players – de jure recognized and unrecognized de facto states of the South Caucasus. The basic objective of the main players should be to keep the situation on a level preventing the resumption of the armed conflicts. The attempts of forced resolution of the conflicts are fraught with destabilization of the situation not only in the area of any of these conflicts but in the whole region.     

Generalized quasi-likelihood

The quasi-score function, as defined by Wedderburn (1974) and McCullagh (1983) and so on, is a linear function of observations. The generalized quasi-score function introduced in this paper is a linear function of some unbiased basis functions, where the unbiased basis functions may be some linear functions of the observations or not, and can be easily constructed by the meaning of the parameters such as mean and median and so on. The generalized quasi-likelihood estimate obtained by such a generalized quasi-score function is consistent and has an asymptotically normal distribution. As a result, the optimum generalized quasi-score is obtained and a method to construct the optimum unbiased basis function is introduced. In order to construct the potential function, a conservative generalized estimating function is defined. By conservative, a potential function for the projected score has many properties of a log-likelihood function. Finally, some examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results. This paper is supported by NNSF project (10371059) of China and Youth Teacher Foundation of Nankai University.     

Ideas versus ideology: The origins of modern labor economics

Starting with its early twentieth century origins, the development of Labor Economics is traced to the present. We describe an intellectual revolution in which an earlier tra-dition that focused primarily on the institution of the labor union has been replaced by a perspective that emphasizes the various roles played by labor markets in an eco-nomic system. That earlier tradition contained very significant ideological elements, whereas its successor deals much more with the world of ideas. In the course of the debate, which still continues, ideas triumphed over ideology and created modern Labor Economics.     

Flipping and ex post aggregation

We show that Bayesian ex post aggregation is unstable with respect to refinements. Suppose a group of Bayesians use ex post aggregation. Since it is a joint problem, each agent's problem is captured by the same model, but probabilities and utilities may vary. If they analyze the same situation in more detail, their refined analysis should preserve their preferences among acts. However, ex post aggregation could bring about a preference reversal on the group level. Ex post aggregation thus depends on how much information is used and may keep oscillating (“flipping”) as one keeps adding more information. Received: 16 April 2002/Accepted: 27 May 2002     

On strategy-proofness and essentially single-valued cores: A converse result

In a general model of indivisible good allocation, S?nmez (1999) established that, whenever the core is nonempty for each preference profile, if an allocation rule is strategy-proof, individually rational and Pareto optimal, then the rule is a selection from the core correspondence, and the core correspondence must be essentially single-valued. This paper studies the converse claim of this result. I demonstrate that whenever the preference domain satisfies a certain condition of `richness', if the core correspondence is essentially single-valued, then any selection from the core correspondence is strategy-proof (even weakly coalition strategy-proof, in fact). In particular, on the domain of preferences in which each individual has strict preferences over his own assignments and there is no consumption externality, such an allocation rule is coalition strategy-proof. And on this domain, coalition strategy-proofness is equivalent to Maskin monotonicity, an important property in implementation theory. Received: 22 February 2000/Accepted: 22 January 2002 I am grateful to Ryo-ichi Nagahisa, Shinji Ohseto, Hiroshi Ono, Tomoichi Shinotsuka and Shigehiro Serizawa for valuable comments. And I am indebted to two anonymous referees for useful suggestions. Especially, I owe the present proof of Lemma 2 to one referee. I also thank Yukihiko Funaki, Atsushi Kajii, Mamoru Kaneko, Eiichi Miyagawa, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Manimay Sengupta, Yves Sprumont, Yoshikatsu Tatamitani, Manabu Toda, Takashi Ui, Takehiko Yamato, Naoki Yoshihara and the participants of the seminars in Hokkaido University, Kansai University, ISER (Osaka University), Otaru University of Commerce and Tsukuba University. All errors are my own responsiblity.     

The Market Provision of Management Services, Information Asymmetries and Service Quality—Some Market Solutions: an Empirical Example

This article examines the problems of information asymmetry associated with the market provision of managerial services. Such problems are heightened by those characteristics which differentiate services from goods. Two unique, and central, characteristics of services, are intangibility and perishability. These create special problems for the market provision of services. In particular they make for difficulties in assessing quality; whereas the producer may know product quality, the buyer often does not. The asymmetry between sellers and buyers is of two types: Adverse selection and moral hazard. Adverse selection occurs when the buyer cannot observe the relevant characteristics of the seller or the conditions under which they work. The problem of moral hazard is the buyer's inability to observe the action taken by the sellers. If these difficulties are not overcome, the market could collapse as companies withdraw and internalize service provision. However, each market has a number of in-built mechanisms which remedy the harmful effects associated with information-related problems. The institutional arrangements which predominate in particular markets are dependent upon the trust-producing mechanisms within those markets. Consequently, market responses to information asymmetries are far from uniform. The argument is illustrated using the example of the executive recruitment industry. In this respect the paper is a highly focused study of those mechanisms which overcome information asymmetries in one service market.     

The dilemma of recognition: Administrative categories and cultural diversity

Governments around the world combat inequality by means of group-specific redistribution. Some pursue redistribution that benefits groups, but also wish to avoid accentuating or even recognizing group distinctions. This poses a dilemma that they try to resolve by adjusting the category system used to target redistribution. There are three types of adjustment: accommodation (the multicultural approach), denial (the ideal-typical liberal solution), and replacement (a compromise). In replacement the targets of redistributive policies are constructed to avoid accentuation or recognition of inconvenient group distinctions, but still allow redistribution that benefits these groups. Replacement is increasingly in demand around the world because the disadvantages of multiculturalism are becoming apparent while denial is hard to sustain in the face of group inequality. The actual effect of replacement is little researched and less understood, however. Does it resolve the dilemma of recognition? Two examples–India and Nigeria–where replacement has been tried ever since the 1950s cast doubt on its viability.