BANKRUPTCY OF FISHING RESOURCES: THE NORTHERN EUROPEAN ANGLERFISH FISHERY

Since 1983 the Northern European anglerfish fishery, exploited by fleets of seven countries, has been regulated using a policy of Total Allowable Catch (TAC). In this paper, the strategy followed by the European Union (EU) in distributing the established TAC among the seven countries is explored. It is inferred that the EU has utilized a weighted proportional rule, taking the average catches for the period l973–78 as the reference point. On the other hand, given that the fishery situation for the years 1993, 1994, and 1995 can be characterized as a bankruptcy problem, this paper also explores, as possible means of enriching the Common European Fishery policy, alternatives to this rule. This work proposes the application of two additional rules derived from game theory, the nucleolus and the Shapley value, and studies their properties. The analysis suggests that it may be worth considering not only the proportional distribution, but also the alternative rules.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A Noncooperative View of Consistent Bankruptcy Rules

We introduce a game form that captures a noncooperative dimention of the consistency property of bankruptcy rules. Any consistent and monotonic rule is fully characterized by a bilateral principle and consistency. Like the consistency axiom, our game form, together with the bilateral principle, yields the corresponding consistent bankruptcy rule as a result of a unique outcome of Nash equilibria. The result holds for a large class of consistent monotone rules, including the Constrained Equal Award, the Proportional Rule, and many other well known rules. Moreover, all the subgame perfect equilibria are coalition-proof in the associated game in strategic form.

“Now Boarding: The Flight from Physics” David Goodstein’s acceptance speech for the 1999 Oersted Medal presented by the American Association of Physics Teachers, 11 January 1999

All across the country, the number of students majoring in physics is said to be at its lowest point since Sputnik, 40 years ago. The most important role of the college physics course today seems to be to weed out a few poor souls who might otherwise make it to medical school or some other kind of quasi-scientific training. If the profession of teaching physics were a business, we would be filing for bankruptcy. On the other hand, our assets include nothing less than the wisdom of the ages, the most important part of the body of human knowledge. Mastery of that knowledge, a fundamental grasp of how the world works, ought to be the best possible preparation for the coming century. Rather than being an endangered species, the physics major should be the wave of the future, but it isn’t, at least not yet. This talk will analyze how we got ourselves into this fix, and suggest what is needed to get ourselves out of it

FOUNDATIONS FOR CONTEST SUCCESS FUNCTIONS

We examine two approaches to contest success functions. In the first we analyze the implications of contestants´ incomplete information concerning the `type´ of the contest administrator. While in the case of two contestants this approach can rationalize prominent contest success functions, we show that it runs into difficulties when there are more agents. Our second approach interprets contest success functions as sharing rules and establishes a connection to bargaining and claims problems which is independent of the number of contestants. Both approaches provide foundations for popular contest success functions and guidelines for the definition of new ones.

The Theory of Money

Fiat money(1) is a creation of both the state and society. Its value is supported by expectations which are conditioned by the dynamics of trust in government, the socio-economic structure and by outside events such as wars, plagues or political unrest. The micro-management of a dynamic economy is not far removed in difficulty from the micro-management of the weather. However, money and the financial institutions and instruments of a modern economy provide the means to influence expectations and bound behavior.(2) Paper money emerges as a virtual commodity. The dynamics of the economy permits it to serve as an imaginary gold.Although it is an abstraction, it is meaningful to talk about its quantity. Closely related to but basically different from fiat money is credit.(3) Credit, unlike fiat money is not a virtual commodity but a two party contract. The fact that it is a two party contract set in a dynamic context implies that there are chances that the economy may reach a state where a debtor is unable to meet his or her obligations. When this happens the laws and customs of the society must provide default, bankruptcy and reorganization rules. These rules are usually denominated in terms of fiat and socio-economic penalties such as the confiscation of assets, garnishing of salary or time in debtors' prison. Thus the value of paper gold is determined in two ways by the dynamics of the system. First by acceptance in trade, based on the expectation that it will remain valuable and second by its role in the discharge of debts where failure to repay has unpleasant consequences. When taxes are present a third valuation appears in the penalties for failure to pay taxes. The control of the fiat money supply together with rules on the granting of credit and the bankruptcy, default and reorganization rules,in essence, provide lower and upper bounds for the price level in the economy. They also determine the innovation rate of the economy. An innovation may be regarded as an economic mutation; the less costly failure is, the more likely an innovation will be risked. The rates of interest for loans combined with the harshness of the bankruptcy and reorganization laws help to determine the rate of innovation in a society. Government controls only one among many interest rates. A host of institutional details involving risk and transactions cost determine the others. The velocity of both money and credit may vary. Even though velocity may vary, human decision-making takes a finite amount of time. This implies that velocity will remain bounded. Beyond some speed of circulation expectations will degenerate and the economy will break down. In order to appreciate the intrinsic dynamics of a high information and communication mass economy at least three agents must be distinguished. They are the highly visible government; other largely visible legal persons, such as banks and corporations and real persons. Their differences are characterized by their relative power and the size of their communication networks. The contrast between a market economy and a state economy is not a clean contrast. The distinctions are on a continuum. Among modern democratic market economies the size of the government sector is roughly anywhere from 15% to 50% of the economy. Thus the control description of virtually any modern economy is of one extremely large and visible player; at most a few hundred large corporate entities of reasonably high visibility and a mass of small agents known by and in direct communication with only a few others. The reconciliation of a dynamics oriented macro-economics with an equilibrium oriented micro-economics lies in the understanding that the economy is embedded in the polity and society. The institutions, customs and laws are the carriers of process and provide bounds to process. They limit the dynamics.The role of macroeconomic policy is to bound the dynamics of an evolving society. Individual behavior is local and necessarily myopic. Myopic local optimization is consistent with global evolution. An elementary understanding of history and the decision and game theory proliferation of strategies is enough to indicate that the search for a unique or even stationary economic dynamics is an essay in futility.In contrast the search for the correct carriers and bounds on process is feasible.The monetary structure provides the sufficient loose coupling to permit mass independent behavior to take place even somewhat chaotically within institutional bounds.(4) 1. I use the term fiat or abstract paper money interchangeably to stand for a government supplied means of payment of no intrinsic worth. 2. Phrasing this somewhat more technically they provide the bounds on the state space. A state space is the set of all feasible states which can be achieved by the system. 3. Credit such as bank credit from a well known bank may be referred to as "inside money" in the sense that it is a contract between two legal persons in the economy other than the government. Yet the bank credit, because of the visibility and reputation of the bank, may serve as a substitute in transactions for fiat money. 4. Technically the institutions and the monetary and financial structure fully define the state space, but do not describe the dynamics. There is a robust collection of local individual rules of behavior which are all sufficient to provide the dynamic support of expectations that money will be accepted as having value. The control system may be sufficient to guide or at least limit the overall macroeconomic behavior without necessarily providing for a precise or unique dynamics. Money is the only financial instrument without an offsetting instrument. This nonsymmetry appears to be critical in the introduction of time into the model of the economy.Money, macro-economics, strategic market games, general disequilibrium, bankruptcy

Book Reviews

The Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) is one of the most used unsupervised machine learning models. But although the default choice of a Gaussian distribution for both the prior and posterior represents a mathematically convenient distribution often leading to competitive results, we show that this parameterization fails to model data with a latent hyperspherical structure. To address this issue we propose using a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution instead, leading to a hyperspherical latent space. Through a series of experiments we show how such a hyperspherical VAE, or $\mathcal{S}$-VAE, is more suitable for capturing data with a hyperspherical latent structure, while outperforming a normal, $\mathcal{N}$-VAE, in low dimensions on other data types.Comment: GitHub repository: http://github.com/nicola-decao/s-vae-tf, Blogpost: https://nicola-decao.github.io/s-va

Bankruptcy law and large complex financial organizations: a primer

Large complex financial organization (LCFOs) are exposed to multiple problems when they become insolvent. They operate in countries with different approaches to bankruptcy and, within the U.S., multiple insolvency administrators. The special financial instruments that comprise a substantial portion of LCFO assets are exempted from the usual "time out" that permits the orderly resolution of creditor claims. This situation is complicated by the opacity of LCFIs' positions, which may make them difficult to sell or unwind in times of financial crisis. This article discusses these issues and their origins.Bankruptcy ; Financial institutions