Economics -12/E.

The 12th edition of this classic text has built upon the success of previous editions but has been thoroughly updated and revised to give students a deeper understanding and appreciation of the core principles of Economics. Suitable for beginners, Economics is comprehensible but has a rigour that will stretch readers to achieve their full potential. In-depth explanations of key theoretical concepts are balanced with a wide range of real-world examples to help students understand and apply their knowledge. Online Resource Centre For students: - self-test questions - economics in the news - interactive chapters - web links - flashcard glossary - authors\u27 blog For lecturers: - PowerPoint slides with audio commentary - instructor\u27s manual - test bank - figures from the text

The Relation Between Residential Self-Selection and Urban Mobility in Middle Eastern Cities: the Case of Alexandria, Egypt

The present paper attempts to fill a part of the gap in the studies on residential location choices and their relations to urban mobility, socio-economics, and the built environment by presenting the results of a study on Alexandria, Egypt, by analysing the results of a survey in eight neighbourhoods undertaken in 2015. Four questions were answered in this study: (i) “How are the main drivers behind residential location choices in Alexandria connected to various socio-demographic groups or people with different availability to urban and built environments?”, (ii) “How are the main residential self-selections in Alexandria associated with one another and which are the most important?”, (iii) “How are the housing location-related decisions of Egyptians similar to or different from international decisions?”, and (iv) “How can planners and decision-makers use the knowledge produced by this study for urban planning and housing in Egypt?”. Library work and the results of a Χ2 test of independence show that availability of transportation modes, nice neighbourhoods, and affordability are the strongest motives behind decisions. However, socio-economic factors are generally stronger than urban mobility and spatial issues. These findings are partly different from those of high-income countries

Community action for sustainable housing: Building a low-carbon future

This paper presents a new analytical framework of 'grassroots innovations' which views community-led initiatives for sustainable development as strategic green niches with the potential for wider transformation of mainstream society. This framework is applied to a low-carbon, low-impact, community-based sustainable housing initiative in the USA that pioneers straw bale housing techniques within a strong community-building ethos. The project is evaluated according to New Economics criteria of sustainable consumption, and is found to be successful at localising the construction supply chain, reducing ecological footprints, community-building, enabling collective action and building new institutions and systems of provision around housebuilding. However, viewing it as a strategic niche with aim to influence wider society, it is clear that it faces significant challenges in diffusing its ideas and practices beyond the niche. Its model is not necessarily suitable for scaling up or widespread replication; however, the scope for niche lessons to be adopted by mainstream builders is greater, given a supportive policy environment. Recognising the innovative nature of green niches at the policy level could lead to new approaches to governance of bottom-up community action for sustainable development

Inherent Agency Conflict Built into the Auditor Remuneration Model

This paper provides a model for audit market interventions. The study asks whether interventions in the audit market result in excessive premiums at the cost of quality and independence. The model was tested based on a historical data sample of 1,927 companies’ fiscal year financial statements, observed for the period 2010–2013. The testing strategy combined statistical analysis of the market concentration and regression of abnormal results. The findings do not support, for the Polish market, the conclusion that the audit market is used as a leverage for consulting services. This paper discusses possibilities of systematic risk for policymakers as a result of the negative interaction between regulated and non-regulated markets

Effects of presenting forest simulation results on the forest values and attitudes of forestry professionals and other forest users in Central Labrador

This research tested whether demonstration of the long term effect of different forest management scenarios in a large forested area changes people's forest values and attitudes. Forestry professionals and other forest users in Central Labrador were shown simulation results of three alternative forest management scenarios illustrating possible long term effects on various indicators. Forest values and attitudes towards forestry were measured before and after the presentation. Our conception of values and attitudes is based on the cognitive hierarchy model of human behaviour which states that values are more enduring and more difficult to change than attitudes. It was thus hypothesized that attitudes would change but not values and that change in forestry professionals would be less than in other forest users since foresters are trained to think about long-term effects and large-scale processes of forest management scenarios. We also hypothesized that a greater number of people would have an opinion on forest management after the presentation. All three hypotheses were partially supported by the results. The results indicated that some attitude change occurred, but that values also changed somewhat. Most of the significant changes occurred when persons with no clear opinion on several forest-related questions formed an opinion. Long-term, landscape simulation results provide valuable information and enhance understanding of both forestry professionals and other forest users. However, being provided the same information, the two groups learned different things. While forest users gained more confidence in the current forest management plan and were motivated to further participate, professionals learned more specific things. This reflects differences between technical and local knowledge

Issues in designing learning by teaching systems

Abstract: Learning by teaching systems are a relatively recent approach to designing Intelligent Learning Environments that place learners in the role of tutors. These systems are based on the practice of peer tutoring where students take on defined roles of tutor and tutee. An architecture for learning by teaching systems is described that does not require the domain model of an Intelligent Tutoring System. However a mutual communication language is needed and is defined by a conceptual syntax that delimits the domain content of the dialogue. An example learning by teaching system is described for the domain of qualitative economics. The construction and testing of this system inform a discussion of the major design issues involved: the nature of the learnt model, the form of the conceptual syntax, the control of the interaction and the possible introduction of domain knowledge. 1

Is social identity belief independent?

In this paper we aim to disentangle the effects on in-group favoritism driven by beliefs from those stemming from group identity, with the final goal of testing the relative power of three potential explanations of this bias: The Beliefs Driven Explanation (BDE), the Group Identity Explanation (GIE) and the Belief-mediated Group Identity Explanation (BGE). The BDE suggests that in-group favoritism is only driven by the desire not to let others’ expectations down. The GIE claims that people have a preference, per se, for members of their group. According to the BGE, people also have a preference for members of their group, but this is mediated by their second-order beliefs. To this aim, we built an experimental design able to produce exogenous variations in both group membership and expectations, hence providing a genuine test for the rationale of in-group bias. The results of our experiment suggest that beliefs per se are not a significant explanation of in-group favoritism and hence do not provide support to the BDE. Our experimental evidence does not provide support also to the BGE. We conclude that our experiment suggests to single out the GIE as the most powerful explanation of social identity

Behavioral assumptions and management ability

The paper explores the consequences that relying on different behavioral assumptions in training managers may have on their future performance. We argue that training with an emphasis on the standard assumptions used in economics (rationality and self-interest) is good for technical posts but may also lead future managers to rely excessively on rational and explicit safeguarding, crowding out instinctive relational heuristics and signaling a “bad” human type to potential partners. In contrast, human assumptions used in management theories, because of their diverse, implicit and even contradictory nature, do not conflict with the innate set of cooperative tools and may provide a good training ground for such tools. We present tentative confirmatory evidence by examining how the weight given to behavioral assumptions in the core courses of the top 100 business schools influences the average salaries of their MBA graduates. Controlling for the self-selected average quality of their students and some other schools’ characteristics, average salaries are seen to be significantly greater for schools whose core MBA courses contain a higher proportion of management courses as opposed to courses based on economics or technical disciplines.Evolutionary psychology, economics, management, relational heuristics, rationality, self-interest.