Considerations regarding price in oligopolistic structured markets

Economists report price rigidity in markets with oligopolistic structures, while explaining the phenomenon. If an oligopolistic firm raises prices, other prices will remain stable in oligopolistic firms, so we will see a significant decrease in sales volume in the firm which increased prices. To avoid this situation an oligopolistic company will not initiate price increases. If oligopolistic firms lower prices, other oligopolistic firms will reduce prices promptly and the result will be that of lower volume of sales - will sell the same physical volume of goods but at a lower price. To avoid this situation, the company will not initiate oligopolistic price decreases

Modelling the Semantic Web using a Type System

We present an approach for modeling the Semantic Web as a type system. By using a type system, we can use symbolic representation for representing linked data. Objects with only data properties and references to external resources are represented as terms in the type system. Triples are represented symbolically using type constructors as the predicates. In our type system, we allow users to add analytics that utilize machine learning or knowledge discovery to perform inductive reasoning over data. These analytics can be used by the inference engine when performing reasoning to answer a query. Furthermore, our type system defines a means to resolve semantic heterogeneity on-the-fly

A Survey of Islamic Fundamentalist Activism in Central Asia and the Caucasus

This survey of regional elites, conducted in November of 2001, concludes that the goals of the region’s Islamic fundamentalist groups include mobilization of Islamic faithful into radical activities, planning for sabotage of US military operations, and working to overthrow secular regimes

Rapidly Rotating Fermi Gases

We show that the density profile of a Fermi gas in rapidly rotating potential will develop prominent features reflecting the underlying Landau level like energy spectrum. Depending on the aspect ratio of the trap, these features can be a sequence of ellipsoidal volumes or a sequence of quantized steps.Comment: 4 pages, 1 postscript fil

Dependencies and Simultaneity in Membrane Systems

Membrane system computations proceed in a synchronous fashion: at each step all the applicable rules are actually applied. Hence each step depends on the previous one. This coarse view can be refined by looking at the dependencies among rule occurrences, by recording, for an object, which was the a rule that produced it and subsequently (in a later step), which was the a rule that consumed it. In this paper we propose a way to look also at the other main ingredient in membrane system computations, namely the simultaneity in the rule applications. This is achieved using zero-safe nets that allows to synchronize transitions, i.e., rule occurrences. Zero-safe nets can be unfolded into occurrence nets in a classical way, and to this unfolding an event structure can be associated. The capability of capturing simultaneity of zero-safe nets is transferred on the level of event structure by adding a way to express which events occur simultaneously

Perspectives on Caucasus Issues

From 29 March to 1 April 2000 several Humanitarian Non- Governmental Organizations, based in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and calling themselves the Caucasus Forum, met to discuss humanitarian issues in the northern Caucasus. The goal of their conference was to define the issues facing the region and to develop

The Moldovan Confederation Conundrum

The Gagauz leadership has advanced several basic demands. The first category of demands relates to economic concerns and these appear to be the most fundamental. The situation that they insist be addressed in that there is an economic disparity between Gagauzia and the rest of the Moldovan Republic. If one looks beyond the rhetoric of Comrat, Gagauz political demands are secondary to the economic ones. They demand political parties that would operate in local elections. They want more seats in the Moldovan Parliament and believe that all laws should be published in the Gagauz language as well as in Russian and Romanian. While much has been said about Turkish involvement with Gagauzia, this has not served to generate any feeling among the Gaguz that their cultural roots are in Turkey. Those who emigrate are most likely to go, first, to the United States and, second, to Russia. Ties between Gagauzia and Transdniestria reached their closest during the early part of the 1990s. Since that time Gagauzia has found a more effective relationship working within the Moldovan Republic. The confrontations of recent months are a product of the Moldovan political crisis, not intervention from Tiraspol. They have led to a renewal of ties between these two regions. Transdniestria’s fundamental demand is to assume equal status with the Moldovan Republic within a confederation. There appear to be limited prospects for a renewal of violence such as that seen in 1992. Direct foreign intervention by any one of the three nations with the greatest interests in this situation – Russia, the Ukraine, and Romania – appears unlikely barring a renewal of violence