Death and the social historians: Some recent books in French and English

Philippe Ariés, L'Homme devant la mort (1977), 642 (Editions du Seuil, Paris, 69 fr.)

Pierre Chaunu, La Mort à Paris, XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1978), 543 (Fayard, Paris)

Robert Favre, La Mort dans la littirature et la pensee françaises au siècle des lumières (1978), 640 (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, Lyon)

Richard Cobb, Death in Paris 1795–1801 (1978), 134 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, £4–95)

David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, A Study in Religion, Culture and Social Change (1979), x+236 (Oxford University Press, Galaxy Book, Oxford, £2.25 paperback)

Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death, The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (1979), XV+230 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £12.50, paperback £4.95)     

On the problem of network monopoly

We consider the problem of pricing in a network industry focussing in particular on the issue of cross-network pricing (e.g. cross-network cell phone charges). Economic theory tells us in relation to cross-network pricing that collusion or network monopoly may yield welfare as well as profit benefits although any welfare benefits from cross-network collusion may be more than offset by a reduction in competition elsewhere. To address this, we introduce a new regulatory concept: the independent profit-maximising agent. The agent sets prices on cross-network goods taking either (i) a complete, or (ii) an arbitrarily small, share of the associated profit. We examine welfare and profits with and without agent type (i) and (ii) with collusion (network monopoly) between the non-agent firms and without collusion (independent network duopoly). We show that splitting up the network monopoly (creating independent network duopoly) may be inferior for both society and firm(s) compared with a network monopoly ??regulated?? by an agent and that society always prefers any of the four agent regimes over network monopoly and network duopoly. Indeed, employing the agent may reduce welfare losses by a large proportion while having relatively little effect on profit.     

Revealed Preference and Expected Utility

This essay gives necessary and sufficient conditions for recovering expected utility from choice behavior in several popular models of uncertainty. In particular, these techniques handle a finite state model; a model for which the choice space consists of probability densities and the expected utility representation requires bounded, measurable utility; and a model for which the choice space consists of Borel probability measures and the expected utility representation requires bounded, continuous utility. The key result is the identification of the continuity condition necessary for the revelation of linear utility.     

Organizational Policy Advocacy for a Quality Improvement Innovation in a Maternal and Child Health Network: Lessons Learned in Early Implementation

This article analyzes and reports lessons learned in early implementation of a large quality improvement innovation for a maternal and child health network working in a large Midwestern metropolitan area. It uses a case study method to focus on how internal advocacy and policy practice helped network partners accept and adapt to the initial rollout of a mandated quality improvement system that required careful data tracking for a universal screening and referral process for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. Three key findings emerged. Network participants endorsed new outreach to the executives of network partners to confirm their support of and compliance with the new quality improvement system. Participants also strategized ways to maintain program autonomy and disperse concerns about heavy-handed implementation of the quality improvement program. Finally, they identified ways to adapt the quality improvement program in response to concerns raised.     

The Costs of Environmental Regulation in a Concentrated Industry

The typical cost analysis of an environmental regulation consists of an engineering estimate of the compliance costs. In industries where fixed costs are an important determinant of market structure, this static analysis ignores the dynamic effects of the regulation on entry, investment, and market power. I evaluate the welfare costs of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act on the U.S. Portland cement industry, accounting for these effects through a dynamic model of oligopoly in the tradition of Ericson and Pakes (1995). Using the two‐step estimator of Bajari, Benkard, and Levin (2007), I recover the entire cost structure of the industry, including the distributions of sunk entry costs and capacity adjustment costs. My primary finding is that the Amendments have significantly increased the sunk cost of entry, leading to a loss of between $810M and $3.2B in product market surplus. A static analysis misses the welfare penalty on consumers, and obtains the wrong sign of the welfare effects on incumbent firms.     

Building a reputation along the value chain at Levi Strauss

The authors identify the value chain as a valuable management tool in building a corporate reputation. Examples of beneficial effects of value chain links on the company's reputation are presented using programmes from Levi Strauss.     

A delayed demand supply chain: Incentives for upstream players

We study a decentralized supply chain where only delayed market demand information is available for making replenishment decisions. The impact of this delay is quantified in a serially linked two-level supply chain where each player exploits the order-up-to replenishment policy. The market demand is assumed to be a first-order autoregressive process. It is shown that the first level of the supply chain benefits from shorter time delays; however, the benefit for the second level is quite minor at best and can sometimes even be (counter-intuitively) detrimental. We conclude that the second level does not have a strong incentive to reduce the time delays in the shared market demand information.     

Promoting Prevention: Targeting Family-Based Risk and Protective Factors for Drug Use and Youth Offending in Swansea

The multi-agency, multiple-intervention Promoting Preventioninitiative to prevent youth offending in Swansea was evaluatedwith a computer-based interactive questionnaire with five hundredand eighty young people (aged eleven to eighteen years). Resultsindicate that multiple exposure to risk factors within the familydomain significantly increases the likelihood that a young personwill become involved in school exclusion, drug-taking and offending,whilst exposure to multiple protective factors decrease thelikelihood of these problem behaviours. The evaluation processindicates that Promoting Prevention’s cross-cutting andconsultative methodology is an empowering and engaging way oftargeting family-based interventions.     

A NOTE ON BAYES FACTORS

This note establishes a connection between Bayes factors and the use of the logarithmic score utility function for model selection in a Bayesian context. The connection presented provides insights into Bayes factors.