Understanding Public-Private Partnerships: Strategic Alliances, Risk Aversion, and Policy Diffusion

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have experienced tremendous growth worldwide since governments in the UK utilized private financing for public infrastructure in the 1990s. Throughout the past few decades, scholars have researched the concept, development, drivers, and performance of PPPs. However, the extant research stems predominately from the lens of governments and focuses on how governments screen and select private partners. A neglect of the private sector’s preference toward and selection of governmental partners would hinder scholarly understandings of PPP formation. Such overlook may also hinder the utilization and development of PPPs in public service delivery. This dissertation uses three essays to theoretically and empirically explore the factors that influence the formation of PPPs, from three distinct perspectives, namely, network, organizational, and spatial views. The first essay innovatively develops a network of PPPs and depicts preferences among public and private entities. The second essay, from an organizational angle, centers on private partners’ risk aversion toward fiscally constrained governments. The third essay, at a macro level, explains how PPP formation diffuses and expands over time and across space. All analyses use data from China, where PPPs have seen a rapid and exponential rise since 2014. The first essay draws on the resource-based theory and uses social network analysis to investigate government preferences for private partners. The data show that private entities with greater access to and control over unique resources are the most influential and powerful partners. The second essay utilizes a causal mediation analysis and finds that a higher level of government fiscal stress may signal higher fiscal risk and thus trigger a higher degree of risk aversion of the private sector. The third essay, based on theories of policy diffusion and advances in spatial econometrics modeling, suggests that the spread of PPPs is a result of policy emulation among geographically, economically, and administratively proximate governments. By utilizing different methods, this dissertation advances scholarly understandings of drivers and barriers to PPP formation from public and private sides. It provides policymakers with practical insights on PPP adoption and how to properly address both public and private actors’ preferences and priorities in the partnerships

Short-term generation scheduling in a hydrothermal power system.

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Translating Phrases in Neural Machine Translation

Phrases play an important role in natural language understanding and machine translation (Sag et al., 2002; Villavicencio et al., 2005). However, it is difficult to integrate them into current neural machine translation (NMT) which reads and generates sentences word by word. In this work, we propose a method to translate phrases in NMT by integrating a phrase memory storing target phrases from a phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system into the encoder-decoder architecture of NMT. At each decoding step, the phrase memory is first re-written by the SMT model, which dynamically generates relevant target phrases with contextual information provided by the NMT model. Then the proposed model reads the phrase memory to make probability estimations for all phrases in the phrase memory. If phrase generation is carried on, the NMT decoder selects an appropriate phrase from the memory to perform phrase translation and updates its decoding state by consuming the words in the selected phrase. Otherwise, the NMT decoder generates a word from the vocabulary as the general NMT decoder does. Experiment results on the Chinese to English translation show that the proposed model achieves significant improvements over the baseline on various test sets.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 201

Commentary on: Jiaming Li & Jidong Li’s “Wang Chong’s thoughts on argumentation”

although there are a lot of points worthy of discussion in Li and Li\u27s article, one thing is certain, that is, they give an overview of Wang\u27s argumentation theory, which falsifies Becker\u27s assertion that there is no argumentation in ancient China. I hope that Li and Li will have more systematic and theoretical research results about Wang\u27s argumentation theory soon