Endogenous Institution Formation under a Catching-up Strategy in Developing Countries1

This paper explores endogenous institution formation under a catching-up strategy in developing countries. Since the catching-up strategy is normally against the compartive advantages of the developing countries, it can not be implemented through laissez-faire market mechanisms, and a government needs to establish non-market institutions to implement the strategy. In a simple two-sector model, the authors show that an institutional complex of price distortion, output control, and a directive allocation system is sufficient to implement the best allocation for the catching-up strategy. Furthermore, removing any of the three components will make it no longer implementable. The analysis also compares the best allocation and prices under the catching-up strategy with their counterparts under no distortions. The results of this paper provide important implications for understanding the institution formation in the developing countries that were pursuing a catching-up strategy after World War II.development strategy; institution; price distortion; output control; directive allocation system

A New Distributed Localization Method for Sensor Networks

This paper studies the problem of determining the sensor locations in a large sensor network using relative distance (range) measurements only. Our work follows from a seminal paper by Khan et al. [1] where a distributed algorithm, known as DILOC, for sensor localization is given using the barycentric coordinate. A main limitation of the DILOC algorithm is that all sensor nodes must be inside the convex hull of the anchor nodes. In this paper, we consider a general sensor network without the convex hull assumption, which incurs challenges in determining the sign pattern of the barycentric coordinate. A criterion is developed to address this issue based on available distance measurements. Also, a new distributed algorithm is proposed to guarantee the asymptotic localization of all localizable sensor nodes

Global stabilization for triangular formations under mixed distance and bearing constraints

This paper addresses the triangular formation control problem for a system of three agents under mixed distance and bearing constraints. The main challenge is to find a fully distributed control law for each agent to guarantee the global convergence towards a desired triangular formation. To solve this problem, we invoke the property that a triangle can be uniquely determined by the lengths of its two sides together with the magnitude of the corresponding included angle. Based on this feature, we design a class of control strategies, under which each agent is only responsible for a single control variable, i.e., a distance or an angle, such that the control laws can be implemented in local coordinate frames. The global convergence is shown by analyzing the dynamics of the closed-loop system in its cascade form. Then we discuss some extensions on more general formation shapes and give the quadrilateral formation as an example. Simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies

Distributed Finite-Time Cooperative Localization for Three-Dimensional Sensor Networks

This paper addresses the distributed localization problem for a network of sensors placed in a three-dimensional space, in which sensors are able to perform range measurements, i.e., measure the relative distance between them, and exchange information on a network structure. First, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for node localizability using barycentric coordinates. Then, building on this theoretical result, we design a distributed localizability verification algorithm, in which we propose and employ a novel distributed finite-time algorithm for sum consensus. Finally, we develop a distributed localization algorithm based on conjugate gradient method, and we derive a theoretical guarantee on its performance, which ensures finite-time convergence to the exact position for all localizable nodes. The efficiency of our algorithm compared to the existing ones from the state-of-the-art literature is further demonstrated through numerical simulations.Comment: 39 pages, 7 figures, under revie