Young Malinowski

Roy Ellen, Ernest Gellner, Grazyna Kubica, Janusz Mucha (eds). Malinowski between two worlds: the Polish roots of an anthropological tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988. xxv, 261pp., illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. $85.00 (hardback) ISBN 0 521 34566 9.

Robert J. Thornton and Peter Skalnik (eds). The early writings of Bronislaw Malinowski (trans. Ludwik Krzyzanowski). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. xv, 324pp., notes, bibliography, index. $120.00 (hardback) ISBN 0521 38300 5.

Daniel Gerould (ed. and trans.). The Witkiewicz reader. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 1992. xiii, 359pp. illustrations, appendix, biographical notes, select bibliography. US$59.95 (hardback) ISBN 0 8101 0980 8; US$22.50 (paper) ISBN 0 8101 0994 8.     

Index for Volume 32

Abstract

College students with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus often ignore the care of their illness. Faced with managing this illness independently for the first time, they lack the knowledge and experience to do so effectively. Their need to establish autonomy often prevents them from seeking the advice of health professionals. In view of this, the author undertook a pilot study to investigate the role of a peer support group on a college campus as a means of improving the diabetic students' management of their illness.

Three closed-membership groups met for 10 weekly sessions. Hemoglobin A_1c (the measure of average blood sugar over the preceding 3-month interval) determinations prior to participation in the group ranged from 4.0 to 11.7, with a mean of 8.16; after participation in the group, the mean hemoglobin A_1c levels of group members dropped to 6.10 (p < .001). (Hemoglobin A_1c measures lower than 6.2 reflect physiologic blood sugar measures of someone without diabetes.)

These results suggest that the peer-group approach may be a viable way to improve the metabolic control of young adults with diabetes at the time in their lives when they are learning to manage their illness independently.     

RENT-SEEKING FIRMS, CONSUMER GROUPS, AND THE SOCIAL COSTS OF MONOPOLY

Do consumers' consumer-surplus (CS)–defending activities increase the social costs of monopoly compared to when consumers are inactive? Given just one rent-seeking firm, consumers ' CS-defending activities generally increase the social costs of monopoly, but given two or more rent-seeking firms, such activities generally reduce the social costs. (JEL D72, L12)     

‘Mobile mindsets’: EGM venue usage,gambling participation,and problem gambling among three itinerant groups on the Sunshine Coast of Australia

Mobile populations form an increasingly important part of many communities, yet tend to be neglected by problem gambling prevalence research. We explore relationships between problem gambling and the ways in which mobile subgroups use gambling venues. Adopting a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques, we conduct an exploratory examination of three subgroups – construction workers, ‘grey nomads’, and ‘southerner’ tourists on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia. The groups displayed substantial differences in venue visitation, gambling behaviour and problem gambling risk. The group with the least discretionary mobility, the construction workers, were most heavily dependent on gambling venues for economic and social relationships. This translated into higher levels of problem gambling risk, which was further mediated by the inter-personal connectedness of individuals. These results suggest that mobility per se does not directly result in higher risk of problem gambling but combines with social isolation to place individuals at risk.     

Stochastic Learning Dynamics and Speed of Convergence in Population Games

We study how long it takes for large populations of interacting agents to come close to Nash equilibrium when they adapt their behavior using a stochastic better reply dynamic. Prior work considers this question mainly for 2 × 2 games and potential games; here we characterize convergence times for general weakly acyclic games, including coordination games, dominance solvable games, games with strategic complementarities, potential games, and many others with applications in economics, biology, and distributed control. If players' better replies are governed by idiosyncratic shocks, the convergence time can grow exponentially in the population size; moreover, this is true even in games with very simple payoff structures. However, if their responses are sufficiently correlated due to aggregate shocks, the convergence time is greatly accelerated; in fact, it is bounded for all sufficiently large populations. We provide explicit bounds on the speed of convergence as a function of key structural parameters including the number of strategies, the length of the better reply paths, the extent to which players can influence the payoffs of others, and the desired degree of approximation to Nash equilibrium.     

DISCONTINUITY OF OUTPUT CONVERGENCE WITHIN THE UNITED STATES: WHY HAS THE COURSE CHANGED?

Has the progress of output convergence changed within the United States? This article examines the output convergence among U.S. states for the last five decades by making several improvements over the extant literature. By applying a battery of convergence tests designed to capture nonlinear transitional dynamics to real output per worker data (i.e., nominal values deflated by state‐level price), we find that output convergence has not been a feature of the continental United States since the 1970s. Instead, output convergence has proceeded among four subgroups within which constituent states have certain characteristics in common. Our regression analysis suggests that state‐level characteristics related to technology and human capital play a crucial role in accounting for the formation and composition of convergence clubs, in agreement with the recent theoretical models of growth and development (e.g., Aghion et al. 2009; Gennaioli et al. 2013b). The level of technology, proxied by patents, turns out to be a consistently significant determinant even after controlling for endogeneity, suggesting that frictions in the diffusion of technology and human capital may have led to clustering of states with different levels of productivity. Our results therefore cast doubt on the common view that diffusion of knowledge and technology across state borders is frictionless. (JEL O47, O51)