The Effect of Luxury Taxes on Competitive Balance, Club Profits, and Social Welfare in Sports Leagues

This paper provides a game-theoretic model of a professional sports league and analyzes the effect of luxury taxes on competitive balance, club profits and social welfare. We show that a luxury tax increases aggregate salary payments in the league as well as produces a more balanced league. Moreover, a higher tax rate increases the profits of large-market clubs, whereas the profits of small-market clubs only increase if the tax rate is not set inadequately high. Finally, we show that social welfare increases with a luxury tax.Sports League, Luxury Tax, Social Welfare, Competitive Balance

Demography and Innovative Entrepreneurship

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual’s decision to start a business is determined by his or her age and, therefore, that a change in a region’s age distribution affects the expected number of startups in the region. Using German regional data, we estimate a count-data model and find that the expected number of startups is positively influenced by the fraction of individuals of working age—20–64 years old. A more detailed analysis of the working-age distribution suggests that startups in knowledge-based (high-tech) manufacturing industries are affected by changes in this distribution whereas firms in other industries are not. In particular, increases in the fraction of individuals in the 20–30 age range and individuals in the 40–50 age range have a positive effect on the number of high-tech startups.demography, age distribution, entrepreneurship, innovation, region

A logic for recursive programs

GOLDBLATT'S program logic is extended by allowing declarations of local variables and mutually recursive procedures. Standard model conditions are formulated to capture the semantics of the extended programming language. Axioms and an additional infinitary inference rule are given for the new constructs. GOLDBLATT's completeness result is then extended

Information Retrieval on the Grid? Results and suggestions from Project GRACE

Internet computing and Grid‑technologies promise to change the way we tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional and geographical boundaries. Internet computing is just a special case of something much more powerful: the ability for communities to share resources as they tackle common goals. Business today is increasingly international and multidisciplinary. It is not unusual for corporations to span states, countries and continents. It is also not unusual for corporations to bundle together a variety of industries and to collect information and generate expertise in various areas of business, technology and science. E‑mail and the World Wide Web provide basic mechanisms that allow such groups to work together. But what if they could link their data, computers and other resources into a single virtual office? So-called Grid‑technologies seek to make this possible by providing the protocols, services and software development kits needed to enable flexible, controlled resource sharing on a large scale. The World Wide Web has facilitated unprecedented ways of speedy global information sharing. The Grid‑technology will build on this by allowing facilitating the global sharing of not just information but of tangible assets to be used at a distance. Very large databases - literary terabytes and petabytes of information - that now are geographically confined will become Grid‑sharable. This is why - in addition to the computational Grid technology recent efforts are directed into developing data-Grid infrastructures[1]. [1] The most outstanding example is the European Data Grid project (EDG) and its successor EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) headed by CERN and founded by the European Commission

Voluntary contributing in a neighborhood public good game: An experimental study

In repeated Public Good Games contributions might be influenced by different motives. The variety of motives for deciding between (more or less) free-riding probably explains the seemingly endless tradition of theoretical and experimental studies of repeated Public Good Games. To more clearly distinguish the motives, we try to enrich the choice set by allowing players not only to contribute but also to locate their contribution to one of the player positions. The location choice affects what individual players gain, but not the overall efficiency of contributing, and allows for discrimination, e.g., rewarding and sanctioning co-players differently. Our experimental results show that adding location choice promotes voluntary cooperation, although discrimination itself has no signifficant effect on behavior. --Public Good Game,Neighborhood,Cooperation,Experimental Analysis

Prediction of Vibrations of Footings for Highly Sensitive Devices

When planning foundations for devices sensitive to vibrations the planned location should be investigated for vibrations. These investigations have to include the existing sources in the vicinity as for instance street or rail traffic as well as exciting devices to be installed at the same building site like compressor stations or other machines. The present paper shows a procedure to estimate the vibrations at the planned locations for sensitive devices. The procedure includes investigations of the dynamic soil properties, the decrease of the vibrations with distance, and the transfer functions of rigid footings. It takes into consideration stochastic excitation as well as harmonic ones. As the result of this procedure it will be possible to state minimum admissible distances and to specify probabilities of exceeding the given boundary values for admissible vibrations

Increasing the {\nu} = 5 / 2 gap energy: an analysis of MBE growth parameters

The fractional quantized Hall state (FQHS) at the filling factor {\nu} = 5/2 is of special interest due to its possible application for quantum computing. Here we report on the optimization of growth parameters that allowed us to produce two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) with a 5/2 gap energy up to 135 mK. We concentrated on optimizing the MBE growth to provide high 5/2 gap energies in "as-grown" samples, without the need to enhance the 2DEGs properties by illumination or gating techniques. Our findings allow us to analyse the impact of doping in narrow quantum wells with respect to conventional DX-doping in AlxGa1-xAs. The impact of the setback distance between doping layer and 2DEG was investigated as well. Additionally, we found a considerable increase in gap energy by reducing the amount of background impurities. To this end growth techniques like temperature reductions for substrate and effusion cells and the reduction of the Al mole fraction in the 2DEG region were applied

A new logical framework for deductive planning

In this paper we present a logical framework for defining consistent axiomatizations of planning domains. A language to define basic actions and structured plans is embedded in a logic. This allows general properties of a whole planning scenario to be proved as well as plans to be formed deductively. In particular, frame assertions and domain constraints as invariants of the basic actions can be formulated and proved. Even for complex plans most frame assertions are obtained by purely syntactic analysis. In such cases the formal proof can be generated in a uniform way. The formalism we introduce is especially useful when treating recursive plans. A tactical theorem prover, the Karlsruhe Interactive Verifier KIV is used to implement this logical framework