French Occupation of the Lakes Ontario and Erie Drainage Basins 1650-1760

Maps dating to the 17th and 18th centuries and written accounts are used to identify a number of contemporary posts en route from Montreal to Detroit/Pontchartrain which otherwise receive little or no mention in the historical record. Archaeological evidence from the undocumented mid-18th-century Floating Bridge site, near Kingston, Ontario, is interpreted as a possible trader\u27s post/Metis habitation occupied following the destruction of Fort Frontenac and prior to the post-1763 British occupation of the area. Evidence is presented for its use by civilians, who selected the site primarily for its environment rather than as a point of intersection on well-travelled trade routes. It is suggested that this small fur trade habitation may be representative of other 17th- and 18th-century French Régime posts and hunting cabins on the Great Lakes\u27 frontiers of New France

Social Dilemmas Among Supergenes: Intragenomic Sexual Conflict and a Selfing Solution in Oenothera

Recombination is a powerful policing mechanism to control intragenomic cheats. The ‘parliament of the genes’ can often rapidly block driving genes from cheating during meiosis. But what if the genome parliament is reduced to only two members, or supergenes? Using a series of simple game-theoretic models inspired by the peculiar genetics of Oenothera sp. we illustrate that a 2 supergene genome (α and β) can produce a number of surprising evolutionary dynamics, including increases in lineage longevity following a transition from sexuality (outcrossing) to asexuality (clonal self-fertilization). We end by interpreting the model in the broader context of the evolution of mutualism, which highlights that greater α, β cooperation in the self-fertilizing model can be viewed as an example of partner fidelity driving multi-lineage cooperation

Competition, Consumer Welfare and Monopoly Power

An applied general equilibrium analysis of monopoly power is proposed as an alternative to the partial equilibrium analyses of monopoly pricing current in antitrust economics. This analysis introduces a new notion of market equilibrium where firms with monopoly power are cost-minimizing price-takers in competitive factor markets and make supracompetitive profits in equilibrium, i.e., the monopoly price exceeds the marginal cost of production. We assume that the primary goals of antitrust policy are the promotion of competition and the enhancement of consumer welfare. To that end, we use Debreu’s coefficient of resource utilization to determine the counterfactual competitive price levels in monopolized markets and then impute the economic costs of monopolization

The Social Cost of Monopoly Power

A general equilibrium analysis of monopoly power is proposed as an alternative to the partial equilibrium analyses of monopolization common to most antitrust texts. This analysis introduces the notion of a cost minimizing market equilibrium. The empirical implications of this equilibrium concept for antitrust policy is derived in terms of a family of equilibrium inequalities over market data from observations on a market economy with competitive factor markets. The social cost of monopoly power is measured using Debreu’s coefficient of resource utilization. That is, we propose Pareto optimality as the ultimate objective of antitrust policy

Spanning, Valuation and Options

We model the space of marketed assets as a Riesz space of commodities. In this setting, two alternative characterizations are given of the space of continuous options on a bounded asset, s, with limited liability. The first characterization represents every continuous option on s as the uniform limit of portfolios of calls on s. The second characterization represents an option as a continuous sum (or integral) of Arrow-Debreu securities, with respect to s. The pricing implications of these representations are explored. In particular, the Breeden-Litzenberger pricing formula is shown to be a direct consequence of the integral representation theorem