Good Regulatory Lags for Price Cap and Rolling Cap contracts

Price caps are a popular form of monopoly price regulation. One of its disadvantages is the perverse incentives that regulated firms might have to scamp on cost reducing effort during the last years before a price review. In order to avoid this problem a “rolling cap†contract was introduced in the United Kingdom that overcomes this last problem. In spite of their popularity, there is scant research on the optimal regulatory lag (number of years between price reviews) of a price cap or rolling cap contract. In practice, around the world most price cap or rolling cap contracts have a lag of 4 to 5 years, but this is not based on any optimality consideration. As is well known, the regulatory lag determines the power of an incentive contract and thus the incentives to undertake cost reducing effort. Schmalensee (1989) studied the optimal power of regulatory contracts in a static model with uncertainty and asymmetric information. She finds that medium powered contracts are generally superior to the polar cases of high or low powered contracts. In this paper, we extend Schmalensee (1989) model used to study the optimal power of regulatory contracts to a dynamic framework. We use numerical simulation to study the optimal regulatory lag for different combinations of demand and cost parameters under a particular linear quadratic structure. We find that in general a 2 year lag is optimal under both a price cap and rolling cap contracts and that a benevolent regulator prefers the rolling cap over the price cap contract in almost all the casesPrice Cap, Rolling Cap, Regulatory Lag, Dynamic Programming

Museology and anthropology in Castilla y León: the holy innocents

En una región caracterizada por su extensión, despoblación y anemia económica, el recurso a la etnografía como seña identitaria de la acción museística, especialmente a nivel local, ha generado varias oleadas de centros, apoyados o instados por las administraciones, y ha derivado en un panorama tanto más nutrido como uniforme, en el que se echan en falta perspectivas renovadoras, divergentes, y una planificación a escala territorial.In a region characterized by its area, depopulation and economic anaemia, resorting to ethnography as the hallmark of the museum action, particularly at a local level, has generated a surge of centers supported or promoted by the administration and have resulted in an abundant but uniform scene, in which reformist perspectives and territorial scale planning are lacking

Los seguros marítimos y la movilidad como biopolítica de seguridad

There is nothing natural about mobility regimes. They are the result of complex ensembles of power that involve the control of conducts in the form of moral economies. To analize mobility as a political, social, cultural and economic phenomenon circumscribed to the promotion and protection of forms and styles of life, opens up the possibility to investigate, following the work of Foucault, what can be called a biopolitics of mobility. Mobility, from this perspective, must be approached, not from the abstract, but from concrete practices, discourses and technologies through which people, goods, and services are put in circulation. Such circulation, together with its allied connectivity and complexity, constitute what has been termed the quasi-transcendentals for contemporary liberal life. Building on this theory, the article offers a reading of maritime mobility from the study of insurance discourses and practices. In particular, the role of Lloyd’s of London is analyzed as constituting moral economies of maritime mobility.Regímenes de movilidad no son en absoluto naturales. Son el resultado de complejos entramados de poder que incorporan formas de control de comportamientos, a manera de lo que se puede llamar economías morales. El analizar la movilidad como fenómeno político, social, cultural, y económico, circunscrito a la promoción y protección de formas y estilos de vida, abre la posibilidad de investigar lo que puede llamarse, siguiendo el pensamiento de Foucault, una biopolítica de movilidad. La movilidad, desde está perspectiva, debe investigarse no desde lo abstracto sino en relación a prácticas, discursos, y tecnologías concretas a través de las cuales personas, bienes y servicios son puestas en circulación. Tal circulación, junto con la conectividad que la acompaña y la complejidad de redes que se tejen en su articulación, constituyen lo que ha denominado como los cuasi-transcendentes de la vida liberal contemporánea. Elaborando esta teoría, este artículo ofrece una lectura del fenómeno de la movilidad oceánica a partir del estudio de discursos y prácticas de seguros marítimos. En concreto, se analiza el rol de Lloyd’s of London como mercado global de seguros marítimos en la articulación de economías morales de movilidad oceánica

Insurance, subjectivity, and governnace

Insurance, an industry worth 4.6 trillion USD in premium volume in 2016,1 has major effects on how individuals and collectives are governed in the world. With 80 per cent of premiums sold in OECD countries, it is reasonable to argue that the form of governance it facilitates is premised on the liberal forms of life that insurance has been designed to protect.2 If, as argued in the ‘Introduction’, doing a socio-political economy of the globe is indeed possible, the problem of understanding the role of insurance in creating liberal governance in the world, and the possibility of questioning and resisting this process, is certainly an important challenge. This can only be done, as posed by the forum, by integrating the analysis of the political, the economic and the sociocultural, of the everyday and the global, as a single problem space where an integration between IPE and IPS has much to offer. This contribution to the forum focuses on identifying empirical spaces where IPE meets IPS in the problem that results from insurantial practices of governing through risk

Gaussian-Process-based Robot Learning from Demonstration

Endowed with higher levels of autonomy, robots are required to perform increasingly complex manipulation tasks. Learning from demonstration is arising as a promising paradigm for transferring skills to robots. It allows to implicitly learn task constraints from observing the motion executed by a human teacher, which can enable adaptive behavior. We present a novel Gaussian-Process-based learning from demonstration approach. This probabilistic representation allows to generalize over multiple demonstrations, and encode variability along the different phases of the task. In this paper, we address how Gaussian Processes can be used to effectively learn a policy from trajectories in task space. We also present a method to efficiently adapt the policy to fulfill new requirements, and to modulate the robot behavior as a function of task variability. This approach is illustrated through a real-world application using the TIAGo robot.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure