Economic man – or straw man?

The target article by Henrich et al. describes some economic experiments carried out in fifteen small-scale societies. The results are broadly supportive of an approach to understanding social norms that is commonplace among game theorists. It is therefore perverse that the rhetorical part of the paper should be devoted largely to claiming that “economic man” is an experimental failure that needs to be replaced by an alternative paradigm. This brief commentary contests the paper's caricature of economic theory, and offers a small sample of the enormous volume of experimental data that would need to be overturned before “economic man” could be junked

Does game theory work? The bargaining challenge

Book description: This volume brings together all of Ken Binmore's influential experimental papers on bargaining along with newly written commentary in which Binmore discusses the underlying game theory and addresses the criticism leveled at it by behavioral economists. When Binmore began his experimental work in the 1980s, conventional wisdom held that game theory would not work in the laboratory, but Binmore and other pioneers established that game theory can often predict the behavior of experienced players very well in favorable laboratory settings. The case of human bargaining behavior is particularly challenging for game theory. Everyone agrees that human behavior in real-life bargaining situations is governed at least partly by considerations of fairness, but what happens in a laboratory when such fairness considerations supposedly conflict with game-theoretic predictions? Behavioral economists, who emphasize the importance of other-regarding or social preferences, sometimes argue that their findings threaten traditional game theory. Binmore disputes both their interpretations of their findings and their claims about what game theorists think it reasonable to predict. Binmore's findings from two decades of game theory experiments have made a lasting contribution to economics. These papers—some coauthored with other leading economists, including Larry Samuelson, Avner Shaked, and John Sutton—show that game theory does indeed work in favorable laboratory environments, even in the challenging case of bargaining

A density theorem with an application to gap power series

Let N be a set of positive integers and let $F(z)=\Sigma \ A_{n}z^{n}$ be an entire function for which $A_{n}=0\ (n\not\in N)$. It is reasonable to expect that, if D denotes the density of the set N in some sense, then F(z) will behave somewhat similarly in every angle of opening greater than 2πD. For functions of finite order, the appropriate density seems to be the Pólya maximum density P. In this paper we introduce a new density D which is perhaps the appropriate density for the consideration of functions of unrestricted growth. It is shown that, if |I|>2\pi \scr{D}, then ${\rm log}\ M(r)\sim {\rm log}\ M(r,I)$ outside a small exceptional set. Here M(r) denotes the maximum modulus of F(z) on the circle $|z|=r$ and M(r, I) that of $F(re^{i\theta})$ for values of θ in the closed interval I. The method used is closely connected with the question of approximating to functions on an interval by means of linear combinations of the exponentials $e^{ixn}\ (n\in N)$

Modal Interface Automata

De Alfaro and Henzinger's Interface Automata (IA) and Nyman et al.'s recent combination IOMTS of IA and Larsen's Modal Transition Systems (MTS) are established frameworks for specifying interfaces of system components. However, neither IA nor IOMTS consider conjunction that is needed in practice when a component shall satisfy multiple interfaces, while Larsen's MTS-conjunction is not closed and Bene\v{s} et al.'s conjunction on disjunctive MTS does not treat internal transitions. In addition, IOMTS-parallel composition exhibits a compositionality defect. This article defines conjunction (and also disjunction) on IA and disjunctive MTS and proves the operators to be 'correct', i.e., the greatest lower bounds (least upper bounds) wrt. IA- and resp. MTS-refinement. As its main contribution, a novel interface theory called Modal Interface Automata (MIA) is introduced: MIA is a rich subset of IOMTS featuring explicit output-must-transitions while input-transitions are always allowed implicitly, is equipped with compositional parallel, conjunction and disjunction operators, and allows a simpler embedding of IA than Nyman's. Thus, it fixes the shortcomings of related work, without restricting designers to deterministic interfaces as Raclet et al.'s modal interface theory does.Comment: 28 page

Organic Sugarcane Farming for Development of Sustainable Agriculture in Maharashtra

The economics of organic sugarcane farming (OSF) and inorganic sugarcane farming (ISF) have been examined and the OSF has been assessed with respect to important sustainability indicators such as conservation of soil, water, power and farmers’ economic well-being and livelihood security. The study is based on data for 2004-05 collected from 30 certified OSF and 30 ISF sample households from the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra. The OSF households have been found younger and more educated having larger landholdings and better resources. The OSF is labour-intensive, but its cost of cultivation is lower due to savings on chemical fertilizers, irrigation, seeds and agrochemicals. The yield on OSF has been reported lower but it is more than compensated by the price premium received and the yield and profit stability observed on the OSF. In addition, the OSF has been found superior in terms of economic well-being and livelihood security of the farmer. The study has revealed that OSF has enormous potential for improving sustainability of agriculture and has suggested that organic farming should receive prime attention from all stakeholders to realize its full potential in increasing and providing the much sought after sustainability to agriculture.Agricultural and Food Policy,

A multiple wire magnetostrictive delay line for improved signal and reduced reflections

The amplitude of the output signal per unit of cross sectional area of a magnetostrictive delay line decreases for increasing wire diameter due to the skin effect. For a fixed area a large output signal can be obtained by using a number of thin wires. An additional advantage is the reduced influence of inhomogeneities along the wires. Reflections in this multiple wire delay line can be reduced firstly by means of interference by fixing half of the number of wires to a mass and leaving the other half ends free, and/or secondly through spreading out the reflections by shifting the ends of the wires with respect to each other. A simple magneto-acoustic position measurement system using a multiple wire delay line and one single transmitting/receiving coil is demonstrated

Closure theorems with applications to entire functions with gaps

In this paper we consider questions of completeness for spaces of continuous functions on a half line which satisfy appropriate growth conditions. The results obtained have consequences in the theory of entire functions with gap power series. In particular we show that, under an appropriate gap hypothesis, the rate of growth of an entire function in the whole plane is determined by its rate of growth along any given ray