Assessing Time-Varying Oligopoly and Oligopsony Power in the U.S. Paper Industry

The U.S. paper industry has become increasingly concentrated and therefore been suspected of imperfect competition. In this study, the new empirical industrial organization approach is employed to measure the degree of oligopoly and oligopsony power in the U.S. paper industry simultaneously. The model is estimated by iterative three-stage least squares using annual data from 1955 to 2003. The results reveal that there has been significant oligopoly and oligopsony power in the U.S. paper industry, and the oligopoly power has been consistently lower than the oligopsony power.market power, NEIO, three-stage least squares, time-varying parameters, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Production Economics, L13, Q23,

Visual attributes of subliminal priming images impact conscious perception of facial expressions

We investigated, in young healthy participants, how the affective content of subliminally presented priming images and their specific visual attributes impacted conscious perception of facial expressions. The priming images were broadly categorized as aggressive, pleasant, or neutral and further subcategorized by the presence of a face and by the centricity (egocentric or allocentric vantage-point) of the image content. Participants responded to the emotion portrayed in a pixelated target-face by indicating via key-press if the expression was angry or neutral. Response time to the neutral target face was significantly slower when preceded by face primes, compared to non-face primes (p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected). In contrast, faster RTs were observed when angry target faces were preceded by face compared to non-face primes. In addition, participants’ performance was worse when a priming image contained an egocentric face compared to when it contained either an allocentric face or an egocentric non-face. The results suggest a significant impact of the visual features of the priming image on conscious perception of face expression.Published versio

Diet changes of Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) in Alaska between 1980 and 1995

The diet of Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) in the area of Pavlof Bay, Alaska, was studied in the early 1980s by Albers and Anderson (1985). They found that the dominant prey species were forage species like pandalid shrimp, capelin (Mallotus villosus), and walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma). The shrimp fishery in Pavlof Bay began in 1968 and closed in 1980 because of low shrimp abundance (Ruccio and Worton1). Survey data indicate that, during the period between 1972 and 1997, the abundance of forage species such as pandalid shrimp and capelin declined and higher trophic-level groundfish such as Pacific cod increased. There is a general recognition that a long-term ocean climate shift in the Gulf of Alaska has been partially responsible for the observed reorganization of the community structure (Anderson and Piatt, 1999)