Old controversy revisited: pricing, market structure, and competition

In this essay, I examine the connection between pricing, profit mark ups, competition, and economic activity from a heterodox perspective. These issues are examined utilizing a two-industry Burchardt-Kaleckian production model and a labor-based mark up pricing model; the conclusion reached is that market structure and competition have no fundamental role in affecting pricing, profit mark ups, or economic activity. However, it is generally perceived in heterodox economics that competition does play an important role in the economy. This theme is discussed in conjunction with the going business enterprise

Shared Agency Without Shared Intention

The leading reductive approaches to shared agency model that phenomenon in terms of complexes of individual intentions, understood as plan-laden commitments. Yet not all agents have such intentions, and non-planning agents such as small children and some non-human animals are clearly capable of sophisticated social interactions. But just how robust are their social capacities? Are non-planning agents capable of shared agency? Existing theories of shared agency have little to say about these important questions. I address this lacuna by developing a reductive account of the social capacities of non-planning agents, which I argue supports the conclusion that they can enjoy shared agency. The resulting discussion offers a fine-grained account of the psychological capacities that can underlie shared agency, and produces a recipe for generating novel hypotheses concerning why some agents do not engage in shared agency

Toward the Integration of Economics and Outdoor Recreation Management

The general theme of this bulletin is that improved management of public-sector recreational resources is a multidisciplinary task. To this end, we attempt to integrate elements of outdoor recreation management theory and economics. The bulletin is written for both resource managers and researchers. For the former, our intent is to emphasize the importance of being aware of economic implications-at least conceptually-of management actions that influence the character and availability of recreational opportunities. To researchers involved in developing recreation management theory, we draw attention to the parallel between recreation management theory and the traditional managerial economic model of the firm. To economists, particularly those involved in developing and applying nonmarket valuation techniques, we draw attention to the types of decisions faced by resource managers. We argue that the most important resource allocation issues are of the incremental variety, so nonmarket valuation should also yield incremental values. These values alone, however, are not sufficient economic input into rational public choice analysis. The missing link , or nexus, between outdoor recreation management theory and economic analysis is the integration of supply and demand, as called for by traditional managerial economics. Collaborative research to develop recreation supply response functions akin to agricultural production functions is an essential step that is missing from both literatures. Theoretical and applied work assume greater practical importance if they feed information into this broadened framework. It is our hope that this bulletin will bring the disciplines closer to that realization

Challenges in Complex Systems Science

FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having: many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities; interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics; combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context, science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT agenda

Assessing, Managing, and Financing Extreme Events: Dealing with Terrorism

This paper discusses new challenges we face with terrorism as a catastrophic risk by focusing on risk assessment, risk management as well as risk financing issues. The special characteristics of terrorism compared with major natural hazards call for the development of public-private partnerships, as recognized in November 2002 when the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA) was passed. This paper shows, however, that the temporary insurance system established by TRIA is neither a complete answer nor a definitive one. It raises fundamental questions for U.S. insurers as to how they will estimate the risk in order to set premiums for terrorist coverage that they now must offer to their clients. We discuss some of the most recent developments of terrorism models for helping insurers and reinsurers assess the premiums they should charge and how much coverage they can assume as well as for firms to better understand their exposure. Since the passage of TRIA, the current level of demand for insurance coverage has remained low and we discuss some factors that may contribute to it. After presenting alternative foreign public-private partnerships and discussing the potential role for terrorist catastrophe bonds, we provide some features of a more sustainable program for terrorism insurance in the U.S. after December 31, 2005.

Income Distribution and the Macroeconomy: Some Conceptual and Measurement Issues

Being intended for students interested with the dynamics of interaction of the macroeconomy, income distribution and poverty and who are users of data and econometric models, this article highlights the conceptual weaknesses, measurement errors and biases of national accounts and household survey data that are commonly used in distributional analyses. It selectively reviews the literature on the methodology of linking income distribution to the macroeconomy.income distribution