The Battle of the Windmill Revisited: As recounted by Lieutenant Andrew Agnew, 93rd Highland Regiment of Foot, 8 December 1838

The failure of William Lyon McKenzie, Louis Joseph Papineau, and other like-minded reformers to bring about meaningful change in the political, economic, and social structure of Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 did not end the greater possibility of rebellion, and in fact a greater threat came in 1838, with widespread filibustering along the American border. On 11 November 1838, a force of about 400 men set out from New York State for Prescott, Upper Canada, its goal being the capture of Fort Wellington and the severance of communications between Upper and Lower Canada. The force, led by Nils von Schoultz, a true character in every sense of the word, landed and took up positions in a windmill and six stone house at the village of New Jerusalem, where they intended to hold out until reinforcements arrived from Ogdensburg, New York, and from Upper Canada itself. The reinforcements never arrived and the ‘sympathizers’ were left to fight a strong force of British regulars and militia. Contemporary accounts of the Battle of Windmill are difficult to find, and are often limited in scope. Several brief accounts have been reprinted in J.A. Morris, Prescott 1810–1967 (1967), and accounts of the conflict may also be found in contemporary issues of the Kingston Chronicle and Gazette. However, the information remains somewhat cursory and limited in colour and detail. The letter reprinted below was written on 8 December 1838, the very day Nils von Schoultz was executed, by an officer of the 93rd Highland Regiment of Foot who had taken an active part in the conflict. The letter’s author, Lieutenant Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw, was the eldest son of one of southern Scotland’s prominent landed families

Informational Size and Efficient Auctions

We develop an auction model for the case of interdependent values and multidimensional signals in which agents’ signals are correlated. We provide conditions under which a modification of the Vickrey auction which includes payments to the bidders will result in an ex post efficient outcome. Furthermore, we provide a definition of informational size such that the necessary payments to bidders will be arbitrarily small if agents are sufficiently informationally small.Auctions, Incentive Compatibility, Mechanism Design, Interdependent Values

Implementation with Interdependent Valuations

It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent’s type affects other agents’ utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to truthfully reveal his type when faced with CGV payments. We show that when agents are informationally small, there exist small modifications to CGV that restore incentive compatibility. We further show that truthful revelation is an approximate ex post equilibrium. Lastly, we show that in replicated settings aggregate payments sufficient to induce truthful revelation go to zero.Auctions, Incentive Compatibility, Mechanism Design, Interdependent Values, Ex Post Incentive Compatibility

Informational Smallness and Privae Momnitoring in Repeated Games, Second Version

We consider repeated games with private monitoring that are .close. to repeated games with public/perfect monitoring. A private monitoring information structure is close to a public monitoring information structure when private signals can generate approximately the same distribution of the public signal once they are aggregated into a public signal by some public coordination device. A player.s informational size associated with the public coordination device is the key to inducing truth-telling in nearby private monitoring games when communication is possible. A player is informationally small given a public coordination device if she believes that her signal is likely to have a small impact on the public signal generated by the public coordinating device. We show that a uniformly strict equilibrium with public monitoring is robust in a certain sense: it remains an equilibrium in nearby private monitoring repeated games when the associated public coordination device, which makes private monitoring close to public monitoring, keeps every player informationally small at the same time. We also prove a new folk theorem for repeated games with private monitoring and communication by exploiting the connection between public monitoring games and private monitoring games via public coordination devices.Communication, Folk theorem, Informational size, Perfect monitoring, Private monitoring, Public monitoring, Repeated games, Robustness

Aggregation of Expert Opinions

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only slight distortions will be necessary when agents are "informationally small." We further show that as the number of informed agents becomes large the necessary distortion goes to zero. We argue that the particular mechanisms analyzed are substantially less demanding informationally than those typically employed in implementation and virtual implementation. In particular, the equilibria we analyze are "conditionally" dominant strategy in a precise sense. Further, the mechanisms are immune to manipulation by small groups of agents.Information Aggregation, Mechanism Design, Incomplete Information

Aggregation of Expert Opinions

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only slight distortions will be necessary when agents are informationally small. We further show that as the number of informed agents becomes large the necessary distortion goes to zero. We argue that the particular mechanisms analyzed are substantially less demanding informationally than those typically employed in implementation and virtual implementation. In particular, the equilibria we analyze are conditionally dominant strategy in a precise sense. Further, the mechanisms are immune to manipulation by small groups of agents.Information aggregation, Asymmetric information, Cheap talk, Experts

On Price-Taking Behavior in Asymmetric Information Economies

It is understood that rational expectations equilibria may not be incentive compatible: agents with private information may be able to affect prices through the information conveyed by their market behavior. We present a simple general equilibrium model to illustrate the connection between the notion of informational size presented in McLean and Postlewaite (2002) and the incentive properties of market equilibria. Specifically, we show that fully revealing market equilibria are not incentive compatible for an economy with few privately informed producers because of the producers’ informational size, but that replicating the economy decreases agents’ informational size. For sufficiently large economies, there exists an incentive compatible fully revealing market equilibrium.Rational Expectations Equilibria, Informational Smallness

Innovation against change

There is presently an increased enthusiasm for competition law enforcement around the world, driven primarily by concerns about the power of digital platform companies. Against this background, this article identifies the emergence of a ‘techno-conservatism’ that invokes a ‘rhetoric of innovation’ to stymy the field’s ongoing shift towards a more interventionist paradigm. Drawing parallels between techno-conservatism and twentieth-century Chicago school conservatism, the article holds that appeals to innovation are a means of deterring enforcement against dominant companies in dynamic markets. This article contests the rhetoric of innovation, maintaining that it is possible to reconcile strong enforcement with care for innovation. It does so by raising three points. First, innovation often arises from smaller companies and deconcentrated markets. Secondly, many of the innovations associated with technology companies often have their origins in the public sector. Thirdly, innovation is not innately beneficial. It is not enough to defend dominance simply by pointing to ‘more innovation’; thought must also be given to the qualitative nature of that innovation. Taken together, these three ideas represent a useful framework with which to counter the rhetoric of innovation and defend the momentum building in competition law

Marrying into modernity: a social and cultural history of weddings in Scotland, c.1930-2018

This thesis examines the history of weddings in Scotland from the 1930s to the present day. The early part of this period saw significant growth in Scotland’s marriage rate, alongside the development of a highly visible wedding culture that has survived the decline of marriage in subsequent decades. Weddings have therefore been a dominant feature of Scottish society, both in terms of the number that have taken place and in their prominence in popular culture. Moreover, they exist at the intersection of categories that are often treated separately by historians, with the law, religion, economics, identity, popular culture, and community all having a role to play in the formation and celebration of a marriage. The thesis therefore treats weddings as nodes in complex networks composed of these different forces. From this perspective, their development becomes an index of wider historical change in Scotland and beyond. Data provided by the National Records of Scotland, alongside published statistics, is used to trace the shifting demographic and denominational profile of weddings over the period, with local newspapers providing visual and written evidence of ritual features such as dress and venue. The local press is also used to explore the function of weddings within the wider communities in which they took place. These sources are supplemented by responses to a survey designed by the author to elicit further quantiative and qualitative insight into the experience of getting married in Scotland. What emerges is the history of a culture profoundly shaped by modernity and its legacies. In section one, concerning the period from the 1930s to the 1970s, modernity is shown to have operated from below, in the spontaneous standardisation of popular practice, as well as from above, in the legal and ecclesiastical reforms that provided the parameters within which this occurred. Wedding culture is moreover shown to have been a constitutive element of community life. Section two traces the development of wedding culture ‘after modernity’, as its prior social basis unravelled from the 1970s onwards. No longer shaped by community or by a standardised lifecycle, weddings increasingly existed for their own sake, with both the law and popular culture placing increased emphasis on the right to individualised ritual. The ‘modern’ culture of weddings is thus shown to cast a long shadow, obscuring the underlying structural changes that have eroded its wider function in Scottish society