对美国农业市场上合作性谈判协会的考察

一、引言合作性谈判协会是一些美国农业市场的一种制度特征。这种协会以为农民社员提供广泛的多样化服务为特征,其中主要是与各种市场中间商的价格合同谈判。从发展历程来看,     

Determinants of outcome in the pathways through care for children hearing voices

Auditory hallucination, or hearing voices, is generally associated with psychopathology. In psychiatry it is inter-preted as a symptom of an illness, with no connection to the individual's life history. Voice hallucinations in childhood occur in a variety of contexts and have variable long-term outcomes. Little is known about the course of the experience. In this study, 80 children and youngsters hearing voices were interviewed on four occasions over a period of three years about the content of the voices and their overall experience of voices, focusing on the determinants for a promising outcome in the pathways through care. The results indicate that the need for care in the context of the experience of voices is associated not only with high levels of problem behaviour and associated negative symptoms of psychosis, but also, independently, with an appraisal of the voices in terms of anxiety, depression, dissociation and frequency of occurrence. In 60 per cent of the participants the voices disappeared during the three-year research period. The relationship between the disappearance of voices and the course of mental health treatment is, however, ambiguous.     

Exploitation of a crisp relation in a ranking problem

The outranking methods usually contain two main steps: determination of a (sometimes valued) relation which aggregates the preferences and exploitation of this relation in order to choose, sort or rank the actions. In a ranking problem, the second step is the construction of a (complete or partial) preorder from a (valued) relation. We have considered it was interesting to list the good properties such a construction should verify and to analyze some procedures in this context. We present here the first results of this study, which concern the construction of a complete preorder from a non valued relation.     

Cross-National Variation in Violent Crime Rates: Race, r-K Theory, and Income

Rushton's theory of r-K race differences was examined in relation to the rate of murder, rape, and serious assault per 100,000 population and Gross Domestic Product per Person for 74 countries from the 1993–1996 International Crime Statistics published by INTERPOL and the 1999 CIA World Fact Book. Each country was assigned to one of the three macro-races East Asian, European, and African. The results corroborated earlier findings that violent crime is lowest in East Asian countries, intermediate in European countries, and highest in African and in Black Caribbean countries. The median number of violent crimes per 100,000 population were: 7 East Asian countries—34; 45 European countries—42; and 22 African and Black Caribbean countries—149, respectively. The median Gross Domestic Product per Person was highest in East Asian countries ($12,600), intermediate in European countries ($7,400), and lowest in African and Black Caribbean countries ($1,900). Across the three population groups there was an ecological correlation of –.96 between crime and wealth (wealthier countries had less crime). Finer-grained analyses, however, found that while wealth was negatively related to crime across European or East Asian countries, it was positively related to crime for the African and Black Caribbean countries (i.e., the wealthier an African or Black Caribbean country, the greater its rate of violent crime). Future research needs to examine genetic factors in addition to cultural factors as well as their interactions.     

At what price should Bordeaux wines be released?

This paper models optimal release prices of an experience good recurrently issued on markets. Using a sample of Bordeaux wines, we find that using a minimal number of intrinsic and extrinsic attributes is sufficient to explain a large proportion of release prices. We further observe a significant relationship between primary market prices and secondary market prices and general economic conditions. Release prices can deviate from secondary market prices in the short run but remain aligned over the long run. Finally, an out-of-sample analysis indicates that short-run mispricing directly affects the purchase behavior of customers.     

Innovative methods for modeling of scale invariant processes

This paper presents some innovative methods for modeling discrete scale invariant (DSI) processes and evaluation of corresponding parameters. For the case where the absolute values of the increments of DSI processes are in general increasing, we consider some moving sample variance of the increments and present some heuristic algorithm to characterize successive scale intervals. This enables us to estimate scale parameter of such DSI processes. To present some superior structure for the modeling of DSI processes, we consider the possibility that the variations inside the prescribed scale intervals show some further self-similar behavior. Such consideration enables us to provide more efficient estimators for Hurst parameters. We also present two competitive estimation methods for the Hurst parameters of self-similar processes with stationary increments and prove their efficiency. Using simulated samples of some simple fractional Brownian motion, we show that our estimators of Hurst parameter are more efficient as compared with the celebrated methods of convex rearrangement and quadratic variation. Finally we apply the proposed methods to evaluate DSI behavior of the S&P500 indices in some period.     

Identification of Nonseparable Triangular Models With Discrete Instruments

We study the identification through instruments of a nonseparable function that relates a continuous outcome to a continuous endogenous variable. Using group and dynamical systems theories, we show that full identification can be achieved under strong exogeneity of the instrument and a dual monotonicity condition, even if the instrument is discrete. When identified, the model is also testable. Our results therefore highlight the identifying power of strong exogeneity when combined with monotonicity restrictions.     

CREDIT CONSTRAINTS AND THE CYCLICALITY OF R&D INVESTMENT: EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

We use a French firm‐level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1994–2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms’ R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) R&D investment is countercyclical without credit constraints, but it becomes procyclical as firms face tighter credit constraints; (ii) this result is only observed for firms in sectors that depend more heavily upon external finance, or that are characterized by a low degree of asset tangibility; (iii) in more credit‐constrained firms, R&D investment plummets during recessions but does not increase proportionally during upturns.     

TRANSFERABLE CONTROL

In this paper, we introduce the notion of transferable control, defined as a situation where one party (the principal, say) can transfer control to another party (the agent) but cannot commit herself to do so. One theoretical foundation for this notion builds on the distinction between formal and real authority introduced by Aghion and Tirole, in which the actual exercise of authority may require noncontractible information, absent which formal control rights are vacuous. We use this notion to study the extent to which control transfers may allow an agent to reveal information regarding his ability or willingness to cooperate with the principal in the future. We show that the distinction between contractible and transferable control can drastically influence how learning takes place: with contractible control, information about the agent can often be acquired through revelation mechanisms that involve communication and message‐contingent control allocations; in contrast, when control is transferable but not contractible, it can be optimal to transfer control unconditionally and learn instead from the way in which the agent exercises control. (JEL: C70, C72, D23, L2)