The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory,Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics

Economists have lately been called upon not only to analyze markets, but to design them. Market design involves a responsibility for detail, a need to deal with all of a market's complications, not just its principle features. Designers therefore cannot work only with the simple conceptual models used for theoretical insights into the general working of markets. Instead, market design calls for an engineering approach. Drawing primarily on the design of the entry level labor market for American doctors (the National Resident Matching Program), and of the auctions of radio spectrum conducted by the Federal Communications Commission, this paper makes the case that experimental and computational economics are natural complements to game theory in the work of design. The paper also argues that some of the challenges facing both markets involve dealing with related kinds of complementarities, and that this suggests an agenda for future theoretical research.     

INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT: RESOURCE TOOLKIT FOR RESEARCH AND TEACHING

Increasing globalization has affected the way that firms are managed today. While its impact on competitive strategy, marketing, and finance has been well accepted and well studied, its effect on the firm's technology and operations has not. This paper provides resources for research and teaching in international technology and operations management (itom). Included are an extensive bibliography of papers and an overview of large-scale survey research initiatives in the area. By bringing together and categorizing this body of work, we hope to facilitate further work in the area and to help define ITOM'S scope.     

Neoformation: A Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change

In Vygotsky’s writings on development, we find the concept neoformation in the context of his distinction between quantitative-incremental and qualitative-revolutionary change in psychological development. Few studies have taken up this concept. The purpose of this article is (a) to provide a dialectical grounding to the distinction generally and to the emergence of new psychological and personality forms specifically and (b) to describe a 5-step historical-genetic method that qualitative researchers can use to document the emergence of new psychological (behavioral) forms. This work therefore contributes to the elaboration of a dialectical method that Vygotsky himself has failed to articulate in a systematic way.     

Do gender regimes matter? Gender differences in involvement in anti-austerity protests - a comparison of Spain,Sweden and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Responses to the Great Recession are varied across welfare states and gendered in their consequences. Combining gender, social policy and social movement scholarship, this paper investigates how the differential policy responses to the Financial Crisis in three European countries shaped gender-differences in anti-austerity demonstrations. We compare the involvement and characteristics of women and men in anti-austerity protests using data collected at street demonstrations (2010–2012). We conduct cross-national multi-level analysis of demonstrators from countries representing different gender regimes (Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Our results show that gender regimes have a significant impact on women’s and men’s involvement in anti-austerity protests. We thus make an important contribution to research on gender differences in participation in anti-austerity demonstrations post-Great Recession. Our comparison of women’s and men’s participation in anti-austerity street demonstrations suggests that at the country or regime level resources matter more than grievances, but that grievances matter at the individual level. This innovative paper links scholarship on gender regimes with research on protest participation. Resources and experiences of grievances are shaped by gender regimes which provide access to decision-making and social support. We reveal novel insights into the connection between gender regimes and demonstration participation.     

Epistemic Communities: Description and Hierarchic Categorization

ABSTRACT

Understanding the structure of knowledge communities, and particularly the organization of “epistemic communities”, or groups of agents sharing common knowledge concerns, is usually based on either social relationships or semantic similarity. To link social and semantic aspects, a formal framework based on Galois lattices (or concept lattices) categorizes epistemic communities in an automated and hierarchically structured way. The process rebuilds a whole community structure and taxonomy, and notably fields and subfields gathering a certain proportion of agents. It is applied to empirical data to exhibit these alleged structural properties, successfully compared with categories given by domain experts.     

An Anti-traditional Tradition： The American Idea of Liberal Education

美国自由教育理念并非自始至终具有一个一以贯之的形态。杰斐逊开创的自由教育传统强调自由学习、知识的普及与传播,但还是以精英教育为主。但其核心“言说的自由与技艺”得以传承下去,这导致了美国自由教育思想的持续的“反传统”变革。爱默生针对美国商业文化的泛滥,提出注重反思与体验式学习的理念,为反传统的传统注入了活力。美国的自由教育仍然在针对新时期的社会流俗作出必要的调整并将持续下去。     

Rethinking Affect in Education From a Societal-Historical Perspective: The Case of Mathematics Anxiety

Affect tends to be treated in educational research as a factor external to, but influencing, cognition. This is so even in those approaches that ally themselves with cultural-historical approaches that denounce the separation of affect and intellect. In this study, the authors use the case of mathematics anxiety to exhibit and exemplify the ways in which affect tends to be theorized. The authors then present the radical alternative that L. S. Vygotsky initially proposed and that was further developed by scholars that advanced his idea of unit analysis. There are several consequences for the measurement of affect and its relations to other dimensions of activity.     

Democratizing European Science and Technology Policies? On Users,Problems and the Quest for Legitimacy

The claim, that Science and Technology Policies (S&TP) are entering a new phase (or mode) is not restricted to the field of Science Studies, it can also be found in political discourses. A prime example is the EU Framework Programme 5 and the comments around it. Similar shifts can be found in many European states, under headings like 'user orientation', 'problem orientation' or 'sustainability'. These new concepts are often linked to problems of priority setting, to problems of how to increase the effectiveness of research funding, and to questions of acceptability and acceptance of developments in science and technology. The open question is whether this development can be understood as the emergence of a new phase in S&TP that can be characterized as a democratization of science and technology. Framework Programme 5 is used to answer this question.     

Threshold selection for regional peaks-over-threshold data

A hurdle in the peaks-over-threshold approach for analyzing extreme values is the selection of the threshold. A method is developed to reduce this obstacle in the presence of multiple, similar data samples. This is for instance the case in many environmental applications. The idea is to combine threshold selection methods into a regional method. Regionalized versions of the threshold stability and the mean excess plot are presented as graphical tools for threshold selection. Moreover, quantitative approaches based on the bootstrap distribution of the spatially averaged Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Anderson–Darling test statistics are introduced. It is demonstrated that the proposed regional method leads to an increased sensitivity for too low thresholds, compared to methods that do not take into account the regional information. The approach can be used for a wide range of univariate threshold selection methods. We test the methods using simulated data and present an application to rainfall data from the Dutch water board Vallei en Veluwe.