Why Do They (Still) Sing Stories? Singing Narratives in Tanjung Bunga (Eastern Flores, Lamaholot, Indonesia)

In eastern Flores, on the Tanjung Bunga peninsula (among Western Lamaholot speakers), several times a year, ritual narratives (opak) are performed on a square dancing area, where all the clans of the same ceremonial land meet. Three types of narrative are sung, according to three kinds of rituals. The article explains the context, content and performance details of these stories, performed all night long. Why do the various clans continue to sing all these narrative? What values do these long poems have for people who sing them? Until now, studies on this subject have been remarkably few, and not even a partial transcription or translation of these narratives is available. This article offers a preliminary insight into these sung narratives, to show how vital they still are in eastern Flores

Compact weighted composition operators and fixed points in convex domains

We extend a classical result of Caughran/Schwartz and another recent result of Gunatillake by showing that if D is a bounded, convex domain in n-dimensional complex space, m is a holomorphic function on D and bounded away from zero toward the boundary of D, and p is a holomorphic self-map of D such that the weighted composition operator W assigning the product of m and the composition of f and p to a given function f is compact on a holomorphic functional Hilbert space (containing the polynomial functions densely) on D with reproducing kernel K blowing up along the diagonal of D toward its boundary, then p has a unique fixed point in D. We apply this result by making a reasonable conjecture about the spectrum of W based on previous one-variable and multivariable results concerning compact weighted and unweighted composition operators.Comment: 10 pages. Corrected a few typographical errors and an error in one step of the main result's proof. This paper was presented in September 2005 at the Wabash Extramural Modern Analysis Mini-conference in Indianapoli

Revenue Sharing, Demand Uncertainty, and Vertical Control of Competing Firms

This paper argues that revenue sharing is a valuable instrument in vertically separated industries when there is intrabrand competition among the downstream firms, demand is stochastic or variable, and downstream inventory is chosen before demand is realized. In these environments, the upstream firm would like to simultaneously soften downstream competition and encourage efficient inventory holding. Traditional two-part tariffs cannot achieve both objectives in the presence of downstream competition. Raising the price of the inputs softens price competition but distorts the downstream firms' inventory decisions. We argue that revenue sharing, combined with a low input price, aligns the incentives in the vertical chain. The use of revenue sharing in video rental retailing is discussed. Blockbuster in particular has used revenue sharing in conjunction with heavy marketing of availability to grow significantly in the video rental retail industry. Many other outlets use revenue sharing as well. Some antitrust concerns have been raised by smaller firms suggesting that revenue sharing might be an anticompetitive vertical restraint. Although our model does not address retailer market power, we show that revenue sharing contracts can be used by upstream firms increase inventory holding and consumer welfare.

Does the Plaintiff Matter?: An Empirical Analysis of Lead Plaintiffs in Securities Class Actions

With the enactment of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLR) the U.S. Congress introduced sweeping substantive and procedural reforms for securities class actions. A central provision of the Act is the lead plaintiff provision, which creates a rebuttable presumption that the investor with the largest financial interest in a securities fraud class action should be appointed the lead plaintiff for the suit. The lead plaintiff provision was adopted to encourage a class member with a large financial stake to become the class representative. Congress expected that such a plaintiff would actively monitor the conduct of a securities fraud class action so as to reduce the litigation agency costs that may arise when class counsel\u27s interests diverge from those of the shareholder class. Now, more than ten years after the enactment of the lead plaintiff provision, the claim that the lead plaintiff, and particularly the lead plaintiff that is an institutional investor, is a more effective monitor of class counsel in securities fraud class actions continues to be intuitively appealing, but remains unproven. In this study, Professors Cox and Thomas inquire anecdotally and empirically whether the lead plaintiff provision has performed as projected. The anecdotal evidence they uncover is mixed: in some instances demonstrating the virtues of the lead plaintiff provision, while in others showing that the provision has encountered difficulties, including hesitance among institutional lead plaintiffs to take on the burden of serving as lead plaintiff (though recently more institutional investors are taking on the role of lead plaintiff) and allegations of pay-to-play schemes between plaintiffs\u27 law firms and potential lead plaintiffs. Professors Cox and Thomas then conduct a series of statistical analyses of the lead plaintiff provision\u27s costs and benefits. Surprisingly, their results indicate that the ratio of settlement amounts to estimated provable losses in securities class actions---the most important indicator of whether investors have been compensated for their damages---has been lower since the passage of the PSLRA and that settlement size has not increased since the passage of PSLRA. However, they also find that the presence of an institutional investor increases the dollar amount of settlements in those cases in which they appear, suggesting that the current trend for institutional investors to be lead plaintiffs in securities class actions will positively affect average settlement size in such actions in the future. Their analysis also sheds new light on the relative impacts other types of lead plaintiffs, such as individuals versus an aggregation of individuals, have on the outcome of settlements. They conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of their findings

SEC Enforcement Heuristics: An Empirical Inquiry

This Article examines the overlap between SEC securities enforcement actions and private securities fraud class actions. We begin with an overview of data concerning all SEC enforcement actions from 1997 to 2002. We find that the volume of SEC enforcement proceedings is relatively modest. We next examine the scope of the recently enacted Fair Fund provision that authorizes the SEC to designate civil penalties it recovers from defendants to benefit defrauded private investors. We conclude that this provision offers only limited potential relief for private investors. We complete this Part of the Article with an analysis of the serious resource limitations faced by the SEC. The second portion of the Article contains an empirical analysis of the determinants of SEC enforcement actions and the overlap of private fraud suits and SEC enforcement proceedings. Using bivariate analysis, we find that (1) private suits with parallel SEC actions settle for significantly more than private suits without such proceedings; (2) SEC enforcement actions target significantly smaller companies than private actions alone; (3) private cases with parallel SEC actions take substantially less time to settle than other private cases; and (4) private cases with parallel SEC actions have significantly longer class periods than other private actions. Finally, we create a model for estimating damages to compare settlement ratios in cases with parallel SEC actions to those in private actions. We find that one-fourth of all the private class action settlements occurring in suits that yield less than 10 percent of provable losses are settled for less than 2 percent of provable losses, but that there are no private actions with parallel SEC suits with such small settlements. In the final Part of the Article, we conduct a multivariate regression analysis of the determinants of when SEC enforcement actions are filed. We find that the most highly significant determinant of SEC actions is financial distress. Estimated losses do not appear to be a statistically significant factor in the SEC\u27s decision to file these suits

Energy in Yang-Mills on a Riemann Surface

Sengupta's lower bound for the Yang-Mills action on smooth connections on a bundle over a Riemann surface generalizes to the space of connections whose action is finite. In this larger space the inequality can always be saturated. The Yang-Mills critical sets correspond to critical sets of the energy action on a space of paths. This may shed light on Atiyah and Bott's conjecture concerning Morse theory for the space of connections modulo gauge transformations.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, Latex2e with epsfig, submitted to Journal of Mathematical Physic

SUSTAINABILITY: OBSERVATIONS, EXPECTATIONS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Product Variety and Demand Uncertainty

We show that demand uncertainty leads to vertical product differentiation even when consumers are homogeneous. When a firm anticipates that its inventory or capacity may not be fully utilized, product variety can reduce its expected costs of excess capacity. When the firm offers a continuum of product varieties, the highest quality product has the highest profit margins but the lowest percentage margin, while the lowest quality product has the highest percentage margin but the lowest absolute margin. We derive these results in both a monopoly model and a variety of different competitive models. We conclude with a discussion of empirical predictions together with a brief discussion of supporting evidence available from marketing studies.