Editorial

‘Welcome to Columbus College. Is this all your gear?’ ‘It’s all I was allowed without paying excess.’ Victoria arrives at the University of Space, Jupiter Moon ‘You're right, Johnny. You know, there are a lot of other kids who feel just the same way you do. They're confused and afraid, but they don't have to be. The problem isn't that other kids don't like you, it's that they don't understand you, but we do. You're special. You're a latent telepath about to come into full bloom.’ ‘My Johnny, a telepath?’ ‘Probably, but to be sure, take him down to the Psi‐Corps Testing Centre first thing tomorrow.’ ‘How do I find them?’ ‘We're everywhere, for your convenience.’ Psi Corps Advertisement, Babylon 5 Victoria was joining the Ilea ‐ a science station in geostationary orbit above a human colony on Callisto, the outermost of the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Jupiter Moon, which aired in the 1990s, followed the lives of the crew of the space station and the students and staff of the Columbus College of the University of Space. As a drama serial, it combined elaborate science with the mundanity of baggage allowances and spaced‐up new‐romantic fashion. At around the same time, the visually and conceptually much more sophisticated Babylon 5 took us further into the future in a five‐mile‐long Babylon 5 space station, a centre for trade and diplomacy between colonies in the Earth Alliance and beyond, with the Psi Corps responsible for the wellbeing and also the control of telepathic individuals by whom those without extraordinary psychic powers are identified as ‘mundanes’. The same term was used recently in a study, publicized in Times Higher Education, of the benefits of technology identified by students, citing one of the co‐authors of the study as saying that there was ‘considerable evidence’ that technology was aiding learning but that it was not always ‘the cutting edge or headline use of technologies but often the more prosaic or mundane’ uses associated with the organization and management of study time and place (Parr 2015). The findings echo those of Francis (2010), whose ethnographic study also finds that students’ technology use focuses on forming and maintaining context – physical as well as online. But Francis’s conclusions are far‐reaching. He describes the university as ‘decentred’ by this shift towards learner appropriation of technology toolsets and collaborative networks to the shape and use of which they, and not we, are central. Nothing mundane about that, either for pedagogy or for institutional strategy. How did we not notice it happening

Service and price competition when customers are naive

We consider a system of two service providers each with a separate queue. Customers choose one queue to join upon arrival and can switch between queues in real time before entering service to maximize their spot utility, which is a function of price and queue length. We characterize the steady-state distribution for queue lengths, and then investigate a two-stage game in which the two service providers first simultaneously select service rates and then simultaneously charge prices. Our results indicate that neither service provider will have both a faster service and a lower price than its competitor. When price plays a less significant role in customers service selection relative to queue length or when the two service providers incur comparable costs for building capacities, they will not engage in price competition. When price plays a significant role and the capacity costs at the service providers sufficiently differ, they will adopt substitutable competition instruments: the lower cost service provider will build a faster service and the higher cost service provider will charge a lower price. Comparing our results to those in the existing literature, we find that the service providers invest in lower service rates, engage in less intense price competition, and earn higher profits, while customers wait in line longer when they are unable to infer service rates and are naive in service selection than when they can infer service rates to make sophisticated choices. The customers jockeying behavior further lowers the service providers capacity investment and lengthens the customers duration of stay

Technological Convergence: a Strategic Perspective

The information and communication technologies (ICT) sectors are in a process of technological convergence. Determinant factors in this process are the liberalisation of the telecommunications markets and technological change. Many firms are engaged in a process of mergers and alliances to position themselves in this new framework. Technological and demand uncertainties are very important. Our objective in this paper is to study the economic determinants of the strategies of the firms. With this aim, we review some key technological and demand aspects. We shed some light on the strategic motivations of the firms by establishing a parallel with the evolution of the retailing sector.Technological Convergence; Demand Uncertainty; technological Uncertainty; Technology Life Cycle; Internet; Multimedia; Strategy

The World Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund and China

As the first global carbon fund, the World Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) aims to catalyze the market for project-based greenhouse gas emission reductions while promoting sustainable development and offering a learning-by-doing opportunity to its stakeholders. Since the inception in 2000, the PCF has engaged in a dialogue with China to get it to sign up as a host country, because the World Bank and other international and bilateral donors expect great potential of the clean development mechanism (CDM) in China and feel the significant need for building CDM capacity in China to enable it to gain more insight into the CDM and increase its capacity to initiate and undertake CDM projects. This paper first discusses why China had hesitated to sign up as a host country of PCF projects until September 2003. Then the paper explains what has led China to endorse the PCF projects. The paper ends with discussions on the implications of the PCF’s offering prices for the emerging global carbon market.Carbon prices, Carbon market, China, Prototype Carbon Fund, The World Bank

Dynamic duopoly with best-price clauses

This article investigates best-price clauses as a strategic devise to facilitate collusion in a dynamic duopoly game. Best-price clauses guarantee rebates on the purchase price if a customer finds a better price after his purchase. Two different price clauses are distinguished: "most favored customer" and "meet or release." I examine the collusive potential of both clauses in a finite-horizon duopoly model with homogeneous durable goods. In each period, new consumers enter the market. I show that in this context, meet-or-release clauses have a greater anticompetitive potential than most-favored-customer clauses

Soft power and its audiences: Tweeting the Olympics from London 2012 to Sochi 2014

The ‘Tweeting the Olympics’ project (the subject of this special section of Participations) must be understood in the context of efforts by host states, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other actors involved in the Games to cultivate and communicate a set of meanings to audiences about both the Olympics events and the nations taking part. Olympic Games are not only sporting competitions; they are also exercises in the management of relations between states and publics, at home and overseas, in order to augment the attractiveness and influence or the soft power of the states involved. Soft power is most successful when it goes unnoticed according to its chief proponent Joseph Nye. If so, how can we possibly know whether soft power works? This article reviews the state of the field in thinking about public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy and soft power in the period of this project (2012-14), focusing particularly on how the audiences of soft power projects, like the London and Sochi Games, were conceived and addressed. One of the key questions this project addresses is whether international broadcasters such as the BBCWS and RT used social media during the Games to promote a cosmopolitan dialogue with global audiences and/or merely to integrate social media so as to project and shape national soft power. We argue first that the contested nature of the Olympic Games calls into question received theories of soft power, public and cultural diplomacy. Second, strategic national narratives during the Olympics faced additional challenges, particularly due to the tensions between the national and the international character of the Games. Third, the new media ecology and shift to a network paradigm further threatens the asymmetric power relations of the broadcasting paradigm forcing broadcasters to reassess their engagement with what was formerly known as ‘the audience’ and the targets of soft power

The political process of constructing a sustainable London Olympics sports development legacy

This study attempts to develop a research agenda for understanding the process of constructing a sustainable Olympic sports development legacy. The research uses a social constructivist perspective to examine the link between the 2012 London Olympic Games and sustainable sports development. The first part of the paper provides justification for the study of sport policy processes using a constructivist lens. This is followed by a section which critically unpacks sustainable sports development drawing on Mosse’s (1998) ideas of process-oriented research and Searle’s conceptualisation of the construction of social reality. Searle’s (1995) concepts of the assignment of function, collective intentionality, collective rules, and human capacity to cope with the environment are considered in relation to the events and discourses emerging from the legacy vision(s) associated with the 2012 London Olympic Games. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for engaging in process oriented research and highlights key elements, research questions, and methodological issues. The proposed constructivist approach can be used to inform policy, practice, and research on sustainable Olympic sports development legacy

Spaces of mega sporting events versus public spaces: Qatar 2022 World Cup and the City of Doha

In the last decades, many emerging countries have been staging mega sporting events more and more frequently. Among those nations, Qatar stands out for being the first Arab country to host a FIFA World Cup. With the rationale of diversifying its economy and promoting itself as a tourist destination, Doha, its capital city, has recently staged many international events and is literally under construction, undergoing important changes in terms of transportation, infrastructure, and sports facilities. While hosting cities and organising committees often promote the supposed benefits of a mega event, experience shows an opposite trend: outcomes from staging major events are mostly harmful, and their effects are planned to last only for a short time. When it comes to sporting events sites, stadiums, and their precincts, they usually become under-used and very costly to maintain in a very short time, and their precincts are completely abandoned. What will be the destiny of the 2022 World Cup stadiums and infrastructure? How can this event be leveraged as a momentum of experimentation and sustainable growth of its capital city, Doha? Is it possible to transform the Cup’s stadiums and precincts into liveable, enjoyable and well-integrated public spaces and neighbourhoods? This work focuses on the city of Doha, which hosted the 2006 Asian Games and will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup and aims to identify strategies to plan and maximise the post-event use of event sites and venues, more specifically stadiums, to generate more liveable and sustainable public spaces. The article investigates Doha’s public spaces, and analyses the government’s legacy plans for the 2022 World Cup, with a specific focus on stadiums and their precincts. The research aims to be a warning to future hosting cities and presents a series of suggestions on how to best leverage the stage of mega sporting events to promote healthy and liveable public spaces