A Precious Bequest: Contemporary Research with the WPA-CCC Collections from Moundville, Alabama *

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72459/1/j.1749-6632.1981.tb28184.x.pd

Crises and collective socio-economic phenomena: simple models and challenges

Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In this paper, we review recent efforts to include heterogeneities and interactions in models of decision. We argue that the Random Field Ising model (RFIM) indeed provides a unifying framework to account for many collective socio-economic phenomena that lead to sudden ruptures and crises. We discuss different models that can capture potentially destabilising self-referential feedback loops, induced either by herding, i.e. reference to peers, or trending, i.e. reference to the past, and account for some of the phenomenology missing in the standard models. We discuss some empirically testable predictions of these models, for example robust signatures of RFIM-like herding effects, or the logarithmic decay of spatial correlations of voting patterns. One of the most striking result, inspired by statistical physics methods, is that Adam Smith's invisible hand can badly fail at solving simple coordination problems. We also insist on the issue of time-scales, that can be extremely long in some cases, and prevent socially optimal equilibria to be reached. As a theoretical challenge, the study of so-called "detailed-balance" violating decision rules is needed to decide whether conclusions based on current models (that all assume detailed-balance) are indeed robust and generic.Comment: Review paper accepted for a special issue of J Stat Phys; several minor improvements along reviewers' comment

An Examination of the Perceptions of Sexual Harassment by Sport Print Media Professionals

While the impact of sexual harassment in the workplace has been well documented, little sexual harassment research has been conducted focusing on the women who work in the sport industry. This study explored the extent to which female sport print media professionals (i.e., sports editors, sportswriters, sports columnists) were subjected to sexually harassing behaviors in the workplace. Of the women who participated in the study (N= 112), over half of the participants indicated that they had encountered some form of sexual harassment over the 12 months before participating in the study. The perpetrators included their immediate supervisors, coworkers, members of the sport media, athletes, and employees of sport organizations. The study also identified the forms of sexual harassment encountered and attitudes toward harassment in the workplace. Suggestions on how to prevent harassment toward women in the sport industry are discussed