WHERE DOES ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT REALLY COME FROM? CONSTITUTIONAL RULE AMONG THE CONTEMPORARY SIOUX AND APACHE

Governments are public goods that provide the organizational and legal structures by which societies arrange and enforce "rules of the game" that enable divisions of labor, exchange, and collective action. We argue that shared, pre-constitutional cultural norms of political legitimacy among rational individuals provide the foundations of effective self-government. The performance of contemporary Apache and Sioux economies on Indian reservations governed by common federally imposed constitutions is examined to test the framework. Unlike the impoverished Sioux, the relatively successful Apaches are found to have pre-existing political norms that (serendipidously) match the structure of their formal constitution.     

On a Class of Random Probability Measures with General Predictive Structure

Abstract. In this study, we investigate a recently introduced class of non‐parametric priors, termed generalized Dirichlet process priors. Such priors induce (exchangeable random) partitions that are characterized by a more elaborate clustering structure than those arising from other widely used priors. A natural area of application of these random probability measures is represented by species sampling problems and, in particular, prediction problems in genomics. To this end, we study both the distribution of the number of distinct species present in a sample and the distribution of the number of new species conditionally on an observed sample. We also provide the Bayesian Non‐parametric estimator for the number of new species in an additional sample of given size and for the discovery probability as function of the size of the additional sample. Finally, the study of its conditional structure is completed by the determination of the posterior distribution.     

HOW DOES ADVERTISING AFFECT MARKET PERFORMANCE? A NOTE ON GENERIC ADVERTISING

We propose a novel approach to estimating the effect of advertising on market performance that relies on the preferences of firms participating in generic advertising programs. Generic advertising campaigns provide a unique window to observe advertising effects on market performance, because rotations in market demand systematically redistribute advertising rents among firms according to observable characteristics on producer size. We examine producer attitudes towards generic advertising in the “Beef. It's What's for Dinner!” campaign of the U.S. Beef Checkoff program, the subject of the recent and controversial Supreme Court ruling on generic advertising as a form of government speech. We find the likelihood producers favor an expansion of the advertising program increases in their operating scale. This finding is consistent with an advertising campaign that has led to a counterclockwise rotation of market demand and a commensurate increase in market performance in the U.S. beef market. (JEL L1, M37, Q13)     

COHORT TRENDS IN ATTITUDES ABOUT LAW AND ORDER: WHO'S LEADING THE CONSERVATIVE WAVE?

Aging is commonly assumed to be associated with the adoptionof increasingly conservative social and political attitudes.Empirical tests of this assumption have provided little support,but most analyses have focused on attitude domains where publicopinion was shifting in a liberal direction. Using three itemsabout law and order, a domain marked by conservative trends,this paper evaluates the aging-conservatism hypothesis withdata drawn from 18 national surveys covering the period 1959–85.Attitude changes in four cohorts are analyzed with Tay lor'shierarchical goodness-of-fit procedures for evaluating trendsin public opinion. The findings show that each of the cohortshas participated in the shift toward more conservative opinionson law and order issues, and that either constant or zero differencescharacterize the trends in percentage differences between theoldest and the other cohorts. In the absence of differentialrates of change, we conclude that older cohorts are no morelikely than younger cohorts to adopt conservative law and orderattitudes and that period effects are influencing each of thecohorts equally.     

Uncovering Rape: The Watchdog Press and the Limits of Agenda Setting

This article reports the findings of the second in a seriesof field experiments on the agenda-setting effects of news mediainvestigative reports. The authors used a pretest-posttest quasi-experimentaldesign to assess the impact of a newspaper investigative seriesabout rape on a randomly selected group of Chicagoans and apurposive sample of policy makers. Unlike the first study, theseries had a minimal impact on public opinion and policy making,but affected profoundly the subsequent newspaper coverage ofrape.     

INFORMATION AND SEARCH: AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO THE THEORY OF MINIMUM WAGES

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in a concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.     

TWO-PART PRICING FOR A MULTI-PRODUCT MONOPOLIST

This paper examines profit-maximizing multi-part pricing arrangements by multi-product monopolists. The results indicate that prices set by such firms will deviate from the marginal-cost-pricing efficiency norm when multi-part tariffs can be set on only a subset of the firm's product line. Per unit prices will be set above marginal cost when the monopolist sells goods that are substitutes, while per unit prices for complements may be set above or below marginal cost. In either case, the pricing strategy will involve increasing the demand for goods on which an entry fee can beset.