竞渡本招屈考——兼论龙舟竞渡的起源及其文化意义

先秦至今历代龙舟竞渡文献资料及竞渡起源诸说表明,龙舟竞渡起源于先民的生产、生活,春秋战国时期融入纪念意义。各地、各民族原本差异很大,后世在文化传承过程中,纪念屈原成为共识。竞渡中的巫风与其他习俗源于夏、周时代,屈原为代表的楚辞作家,正是继承与发扬了夏、周文化。     

All‐Pay Contests

This paper studies a class of games, “all‐pay contests,” which capture general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor‐market tournaments, and R&D races. Players compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing a score. Conditional on winning or losing, it is weakly better to do so with a lower score. This formulation allows for differing production technologies, costs of capital, prior investments, attitudes toward risk, and conditional and unconditional investments, among others. I provide a closed‐form formula for players' equilibrium payoffs and analyze player participation. A special case of contests is multiprize, complete‐information all‐pay auctions.     

存在荣誉效用的等级竞赛机制分析

针对存在荣誉效用的等级竞赛,研究在等级数已定的条件下,以总努力最大化为目标的竞赛设计者如何设置竞赛人数和各等级人数的问题。通过分析荣誉效用由于相邻等级容量调整所引起的变化对总努力的影响,得到结论：无论能力分布如何,将最高等级容量设置得很小,对竞赛设计者而言,是更合理的选择;当竞赛者的能力分布为凹函数时,将中低等级的容量设置得相对较大更合理;当能力分布为凸函数时,将中高等级的容量设置得相对较小更合理。     

Bribes,power, and managerial control in corporate voting games

Proxy fights have received comparatively little attention relative to the more popular methods for corporate control transfer: merger and tender offers. This paper presents an analytic model of the proxy contest as a cooperative game with four players: management, passive shareholders, insurgent shareholders and a trust fund. The power of the players and the effectiveness of certain managerial actions is discussed.     

Impartiality,friendship-networks and voting behavior: Evidence from voting patterns in the Eurovision Song Contest

What is the extent to which a country's political institutions impact aggregate voting behavior in a comparative perspective? More specifically, are citizens in some countries more inclined vote on the basis of ‘quality’ or ‘merit’ over ‘friendship’ or ‘loyalty’, and if so, why? This paper seeks to address how the extent to which a country's political institutions are impartial (treats all citizens equally, free from corruption, strong rule of law) impact aggregate citizen behavior. When political institutions are more (less) impartial, success in society is more often on the basis of merit (patrimonial ties). This test cases is voting in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) from 1975 to 2012 among pairs and blocs of ‘voting friends’. The theory elucidates that given that certain pairs or blocs exhibit systematic voting bias for one another over time, the bias will be considerably less among impartial states than those with highly partial institutions. Using several measures of ‘friendship’, I find strong empirical evidence for this claim, even when controlling for myriad alternative factors and taking into account various voting regimes. The analysis gives us new insights on how political institutions condition aggregate citizen behavior in general and that although there is much bias in ESC voting, not all bias is equal among friend-countries.     

Book reviews

ABSTRACT

Why do some towns become focal points for anti-minority activism at particular moments in time, when other towns with similar socio-economic conditions do not? While policy practitioners charged with responding to such activity frequently ask this question, it has received less academic attention. Consequently, an adequate response falls between different strands of the academic literature on anti-minority politics.

We explore this question through a comparative analysis of how and why Luton, a Bedfordshire town, became a focal point for the latest wave of organised anti-minority activism in the UK, centred around the English Defence League (EDL), while Blackburn with Darwen, a local authority in Lancashire with a history of extreme right political ‘successes’, did not.

We develop the concept of situated credibility contests to help us articulate the contingent relationships between potential explanatory variables and political outcomes, and describe how ‘demand-side’ and ‘supply-side’ variables interact through the strategic actions of anti-minority activists and their opponents.     

Strategic Choice of Variability in Multiround Contests and Contests with Handicaps

Variability can be an important strategic variable in a contest. We study optimal strategies involving choice of variability in contests with fixed and probabilistic targets, one-round and multiround contests, contests with and without handicaps, and situations where one contestant can modify variability as well as those in which all contestants have this opportunity. A contestant should maximize variability in a weak position (low mean, high handicap, or low previous performance) and minimize variability in a strong position. In some cases, only these extremes should be used. In other cases, intermediate levels of variability are optimal when the contestant's position is neither too weak nor too strong.     

The Promise of Prediction Contests

This article examines the prediction contest as a vehicle for aggregating the opinions of a crowd of experts. After proposing a general definition distinguishing prediction contests from other mechanisms for harnessing the wisdom of crowds, we focus on point-forecasting contests—contests in which forecasters submit point forecasts with a prize going to the entry closest to the quantity of interest. We first illustrate the incentive for forecasters to submit reports that exaggerate in the direction of their private information. Whereas this exaggeration raises a forecaster's mean squared error, it increases his or her chances of winning the contest. And in contrast to conventional wisdom, this nontruthful reporting usually improves the accuracy of the resulting crowd forecast. The source of this improvement is that exaggeration shifts weight away from public information (information known to all forecasters) and by so doing helps alleviate public knowledge bias. In the context of a simple theoretical model of overlapping information and forecaster behaviors, we present closed-form expressions for the mean squared error of the crowd forecasts which will help identify the situations in which point forecasting contests will be most useful.     

Heterogeneous Submission Behavior and its Implications for Success in Innovation Contests with Public Submissions

Innovation contests are increasingly adopting a format where submissions are viewable by all contestants and the information structure changes during the contest. In such an “unblind” format, contestants must weigh the costs of revealing their submissions against the benefits of improving their submissions through emerging information. We take a closer look at how contestants solve problems in innovation contests with public submission of solutions—that is, unblind contests, by examining the implications of their submission behavior for contest outcomes. We analyze the submission behavior in terms of three dimensions: the position of first submission by the contestant, the number of submissions the contestant makes, and the length of active participation by the contestant. The econometric analysis of a large dataset of unblind innovation contests and participating contestants indicates that, despite the potential for free riding and intellectual property loss from disclosure of submissions, contestants who have a lower position of first submission are more likely to succeed in the contest. Further, we find some evidence of a curvilinear relationship between a contestant's number of submissions and her likelihood of success, indicating a potential “quality–quantity” trade‐off in unblind innovation contests. Finally, our findings indicate that increasing the length of participation in a contest has a positive effect on a contestant's likelihood of success. Departing from prior studies on innovation contests, where a contestant's success is assumed to be a function of her prior experience and problem‐solving skills, our study provides new empirical evidence that, in innovation contests with public submissions, the submission behavior of a contestant also plays an explanatory role in a contestant's success.     

校企合作机制的新探索——基于大学生科技竞赛视域

合作教育是应用型科技人才培养的一种重要模式.由企业所主办的大学生科技竞赛蕴含着一种特殊的校企互动机制,对合作教育模式的优化有重要启发.该机制关键要素有三:其一,竞赛主办企业通过将网络技术应用于竞赛活动的组织过程中,降低了与学生互动的管理成本;其二,主办企业通过设置物质和就业机会的奖励调动了学生的积极性,并兼顾了人才选拔的目标;其三,竞赛题目与主办企业的主营业务或者某款产品直接相关,保证了竞赛选拔出的人才与企业的需求相匹配.在这些因素的组合形态下,企业通过付出较低的成本,可以获得较有保障的人才收益,而学生也获得了企业的教学资源、实践锻炼和展示自我的机会.显然,校企合作机制对解决合作教育中企业方成本和收益等问题具有参考价值.