Rivalries

Rivalries are a key aspect of sports, but one with few counterparts elsewhere in economic theory. In this paper rivalries are modeled as a habitual good, and complementary in fan utility with other trade between residents of team locations. Some implications for optimal team investment in rivalry capital, for league investment in competitive balance, and for the fundamental differences between rivalries in team and individual sports are derived.Rivalry, rivalries, team sports

Corruption and Its Alternatives: A Takeoff Theory of Good Governance

Corruption is a function of its return relative to engaging in productive activities. This paper presents an approach for thinking about the institutional features of societies and the resulting amount of corruption. The empirical results suggest that political competition is more important than competition in information-producing industries. The rent-seeking view of the relation between government and corruption is rejected in favor of the Becker (1983) model of political competition. The paper suggests that societies that continually stay open to productivity-enhancing activities will eventually enter a takeoff stage of anti-corruption efforts analogous to the eventual improvement in income distribution that occurs in successful industrialization.

The Sources of Growth at Different Levels of Development

Cross-country growth regressions have become an increasingly common tool in empirical development research. But these regressions typically do not attempt to distinguish among countries in different stages of development. Two empirical methods are used to test for such differences. Several of the factors known to affect economic growth are shown to operate differently for countries in different portions of the global income distribution. The results have implications for the role of financial markets, openness and human capital in promoting growth.

Novel Numerical Approaches for the Resolution of Direct and Inverse Heat Transfer Problems

This dissertation describes an innovative and robust global time approach which has been developed for the resolution of direct and inverse problems, specifically in the disciplines of radiation and conduction heat transfer. Direct problems are generally well-posed and readily lend themselves to standard and well-defined mathematical solution techniques. Inverse problems differ in the fact that they tend to be ill-posed in the sense of Hadamard, i.e., small perturbations in the input data can produce large variations and instabilities in the output. The stability problem is exacerbated by the use of discrete experimental data which may be subject to substantial measurement error. This tendency towards ill-posedness is the main difficulty in developing a suitable prediction algorithm for most inverse problems. Previous attempts to overcome the inherent instability have involved the utilization of smoothing techniques such as Tikhonov regularization and sequential function estimation (Beck’s future information method). As alternatives to the existing methodologies, two novel mathematical schemes are proposed. They are the Global Time Method (GTM) and the Function Decomposition Method (FDM). Both schemes are capable of rendering time and space in a global fashion thus resolving the temporal and spatial domains simultaneously. This process effectively treats time elliptically or as a fourth spatial dimension. AWeighted Residuals Method (WRM) is utilized in the mathematical formulation wherein the unknown function is approximated in terms of a finite series expansion. Regularization of the solution is achieved by retention of expansion terms as opposed to smoothing in the classical Tikhonov sense. In order to demonstrate the merit and flexibility of these approaches, the GTM and FDM have been applied to representative problems of direct and inverse heat transfer. Those chosen are a direct problem of radiative transport, a parameter estimation problem found in Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and an inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP). The IHCP is resolved for the cases of diagnostic deduction (discrete temperature data at the boundary) and thermal design (prescribed functional data at the boundary). Both methods are shown to provide excellent results for the conditions under which they were tested. Finally, a number of suggestions for future work are offered

Order and Creativity in Virtual Worlds

Economies are driven by dynamic creativity, but too much creativity, especially if it is predatory, can destroy an economy. This tradeoff has been known for centuries to political philosophers who have analyzed physical space, but has not been addressed in virtual space. Like physical economies, virtual economies face the tradeoff of encouraging freedom to experiment, while discouraging experiments that drive people away. Physical societies solve this problem both through encouraging competition and giving government the unique power to punish destructive activities. In virtual societies, this tradeoff has yet to be adequately assessed. Guided by the economic modeling of order and creativity, in this paper we discuss two types of behavior, constructive and destructive, to provide some guidelines, with references to experiences in physical economies, for establishing limitations on the freedom of action of virtual-economy participants