Literature and Environment, the Long View: Thoughts from the Founders of ASLE

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) is the primary professional organization of scholars, teachers, and writers who study the relationships among literature, culture, and the physical environment. At a recent roundtable discussion at the Western American Literature Association's Annual Conference, "flash papers" from ASLE's founders offered a fascinating array of view points reflecting on ASLE's twenty year history. Papers look at wilderness, post naturalism, science fiction, pedagogy, publishing and climate change. It is our hope that the set of papers collected here will commemorate a historical moment and spark a continuing conversation on the future of the organization

Is it the Income Distribution or Redistribution that Affects Growth?

Hervorming Sociale Regelgevin

Community Structure and Market Outcomes: A Repeated Games in Networks Approach

Consider a large market with asymmetric information, in which sellers choose whether to cooperate or deviate and ‘cheat’ their buyers, and buyers decide whether to re-purchase from different sellers. We model active trade relationships as links in a buyer-seller network and suggest a framework for studying repeated games in such networks. In our framework, buyers and sellers have rich yet incomplete knowledge of the network structure; allowing us to derive meaningful conditions that determine whether a network is consistent with trade and cooperation between every buyer and seller that are connected. We show that three network features reduce the minimal discount factor necessary for sustaining cooperation: moderate competition, sparseness, and segregation. We find that the incentive constraints rule out networks that maximize the volume of trade and that the constrained trade maximizing networks are in between ‘old world’ segregated and sparse networks, and a ‘global market’