Towards new educational potentialities: Review and commentary of the Preliminary draft Act on higher education

The Higher Education Act is a long-awaited legal act. A number of uncompleted attempts to prepare it have been undertaken in the course of the last three years. So far without success. Having been and still being a matter of highest social priority, the renewed effort to create and subsequently to enact this act is welcome as a worthwhile and a highly productive endeavor. Welcome also are the main innovations offered by this act, particularly its conspicuous consistency with the Bologna Declaration and other internationally launched and accepted documents. The draft act follows the international documents tracing down the paths of the future development of the educational systems of the European countries and providing for their mutual compatibility. A number of other positive contributions of the draft act are singled out, such as introducing clear and rigorous criteria and procedures for accreditation and quality control, introducing a wide coverage of arts and sciences as a precondition for an institution of higher education to qualify as a university, flexibility in the regime of studying including the domestic and international mobility of the students and requirement for the schools of higher education to have large cores of permanently employed teaching staff. A much larger part of the paper is, however, devoted to critical commentaries. To begin with, the draft is produced without any participation of the private universities, which is seen as a form of discrimination. The organizational pattern of a university is laid out with insufficient clarity and the status of departments (faculties) is particularly short of precision and even contradictory. The draft seems to be laden with the old bias towards excessive and potentially disastrous centralization, drastically reducing the decision making capacity of the system. The treatment of the property of the departments (faculties) is found inconsistent and legally unfounded. Inconsistency is also revealed in a number of prerogatives of the university vis-a-vis its departments and vice versa

Consumer and competitor reactions: Evidence from a retail-gasoline field experiment

39, 5 p. : ill.The standard differentiated-product model with Nash-equilibrium price setting suggests that the density of sellers in a market can affect both a seller’s price elasticity of demand and a competitor’s reaction to a price change. Using field experiment data collected around a series of exogenously imposed price changes, we are able to demonstrate that a gasoline retailer’s price elasticity of demand is directly related to seller density, where density is measured by the number of sellers within a given geographical area. This finding appears to be one potential source for observed persistent price differences. The data also allow us to examine the reaction of rivals to exogenous price changes. Consistent with the theory, we find that competitors’ price reactions are in the same direction, with the magnitude of the competitors’ reactions being inversely related to the market’s density of sellers