Revealed cardinal preference

I prove that as long as we allow the marginal utility for money lamda to vary between purchases (similarly to the budget) then the quasi-linear and the ordinal budget-constrained models rationalize the same data. However, we know that lamda is approximately constant. I provide a simple constructive proof for the necessary and sufficient condition for the constant lambda rationalization, which I argue should replace the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference in empirical studies of consumer behavior.

Marriage as a Rat Race: Noisy Pre-Marital Investments with Assortative Matching

We study the incentive to invest to improve marriage prospects, in a frictionless marriage market with non-transferable utility. Stochastic returns to investment eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria in models with deterministic returns, and a unique equilibrium exists under reasonable conditions. Equilibrium investment is efficient when the sexes are symmetric. However, when there is any asymmetry, including an unbalanced sex ratio, investments are generically excessive. For example, if there is an excess of boys, then there is parental over-investment in boys and under-investment in girls, and total investment will be excessive.marriage, ex ante investments, gender differences, assortative matching tournament, sex ratio

A Study of the Experience of Listening to Music in World War Two Britain

This thesis provides new insights into the experience of listening to music during the Second World War in Britain. It explores the different types of listening practised by individuals who encountered a variety of ‘serious’, ‘light’ and ’popular’ music in diverse wartime circumstances, both live and via technological media. The thesis analyses unpublished diaries and letters written during the war, in which listeners reported on and interpreted their listening experiences. It examines letters written to the BBC about broadcast music; the ‘bulletins’ written by Lionel Bradley about classical concerts in London; and diary entries about popular music, dancing and the cinema written by Frank Lewis and several Mass Observation diarists. These analyses are complemented by the examination of professional reviews of popular and classical music published in Melody Maker, The Times, The Listener, The Observer and The Manchester Guardian. Three central questions guide the research: how did people experience listening to music during the Second World War? To what extent were these different listening experiences shaped and influenced by the war? How did the listeners relate to a variety of notions, including musical taste, the judgement of musical value, musical community and identity? This study focuses on a period previously overlooked by histories of listening; and provides a new listener-oriented perspective on musical culture on the Home Front in World War Two Britain. It argues that the war had a considerable material effect on the circumstances of the listeners’ experiences, but that wartime did not necessarily affect their engagement with or response to the music. It therefore provides new insights into historical listening experiences and the musical landscape of the Second World War, while also making a significant contribution to the methodology of historical listening studies

Editorial: Side effects

Editorial for issue 7.2 of Medicine Anthropology Theory (MAT) journal

Medicine Anthropology Theory Now

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Estimating the extent of Antarctic summer sea ice during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration

In stark contrast to the sharp decline in Arctic sea ice, there has been a steady increase in ice extent around Antarctica during the last three decades, especially in the Weddell and Ross seas. In general, climate models do not to capture this trend and a lack of information about sea ice coverage in the pre-satellite period limits our ability to quantify the sensitivity of sea ice to climate change and robustly validate climate models. However, evidence of the presence and nature of sea ice was often recorded during early Antarctic exploration, though these sources have not previously been explored or exploited until now. We have analysed observations of the summer sea ice edge from the ship logbooks of explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and their contemporaries during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (1897–1917), and in this study we compare these to satellite observations from the period 1989–2014, offering insight into the ice conditions of this period, from direct observations, for the first time. This comparison shows that the summer sea ice edge was between 1.0 and 1.7° further north in the Weddell Sea during this period but that ice conditions were surprisingly comparable to the present day in other sectors