Competition and Growth in Neo-Schumpeterian Models

We study the effect of product market competition on the incentives to innovate and the economy’s rate of growth in an endogenous growth model. We extend previous works in industrial organization by assuming that innovation is sequential and cumulative, and early endogenous growth models by accounting for the possibility that in each period many asymmetric firms (i.e., an endogenously determined number of successive innovators) are simultaneously active. We identify the price effect, the front loading of profits, and the productive efficiency effect associated with an increase in competitive pressure. The price effect reduces the incentives to innovate, but both the front loading of profits and the productive efficiency effect raise the incentives to innovate. We demonstrate circumstances in which the productive efficiency effect dominates the price effect. In these circumstances, the front loading of profits and the fact that the productive efficiency effect dominates the price effect compound to make the equilibrium rate of growth increase with the intensity of competition.

Leadership Cycles

We study a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth that produces stochastic leadership cycles. Over a cycle, industry leaders can innovate several successive times in the same industry, gradually increasing the magnitude of their technological lead before being replaced by a new en-trant. Initially, new leaders are eager to enlarge their lead and do much of the research, but if they innovate repeatedly, their propensity to invest in R&D decreases. Eventually they stop doing research ltogether, and as they are overtaken a new cycle starts. The model generates a skewed firm size distribution and a deviation from Gibrat's law that accord with the empirical evidence. We also consider various policy measures, showing that in some cases policy should favour R&D by incumbents, not outsiders, and that stronger patent protection may reduce innovation and growth.

Vertical integration and product innovation

We study vertical integration and product innovation (in the form of horizontal product differentiation) as interdependent strategic choices of vertically related firms. We consider product innovation in the downstream market as a strategic decision of innovative firms facing a threat of vertical integration and market foreclosure by an upstream monopolist. Our main finding is that, although product differentiation allows to soften product market competition and to avoid market foreclosure, the downstream market may prefer less product differentiation to deter vertical integration. Therefore, less product innovation can be a possible social cost of a lenient antitrust policy.Vertical Integration; product innovation; market foreclosure; duopoly

Heartbeat Anomaly Detection using Adversarial Oversampling

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the most common causes of death in the world. Prevention, knowledge of previous cases in the family, and early detection is the best strategy to reduce this fact. Different machine learning approaches to automatic diagnostic are being proposed to this task. As in most health problems, the imbalance between examples and classes is predominant in this problem and affects the performance of the automated solution. In this paper, we address the classification of heartbeats images in different cardiovascular diseases. We propose a two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for classification after using a InfoGAN architecture for generating synthetic images to unbalanced classes. We call this proposal Adversarial Oversampling and compare it with the classical oversampling methods as SMOTE, ADASYN, and RandomOversampling. The results show that the proposed approach improves the classifier performance for the minority classes without harming the performance in the balanced classes

Toc ’n’ Roll: Bargaining, Service Quality and Specificity in the UK Railway Network

The paper studies the regulatory design in an industry where the regulated downstream provider of services to final consumers purchases the necessary inputs from an upstream supplier. The model is closely inspired by the UK regulatory mechanism for the railway network. Its philosophy is one of vertical separation between ownership and operation of the rolling stock: the Train Operating Company (TOC) leases from a ROlling Stock COmpany (ROSCO) the trains it uses in its franchise. This, we show, increases the flexibility and competitiveness of the network. On the other hand, it also reduces the specificity of the rolling stock, thus increasing the cost of running the service, and the TOC’s incentive to exert quality enhancing effort, thus reducing the utility of the final users. Our simple model shows that the UK regime of separation may in fact be preferable from a welfare viewpoint.Network regulation; Railways; Incomplete contracts; Relation specific investment

Volcanic Eruptions: A Source of Irreducible Uncertainty for Future Climates

Volcanic forcing, a major natural source of climate variability, represents a challenge for current climate modeling because of the unpredictability and specificity of individual eruptions, and because of the complexity of processes linking the eruption to the climate response. Volcanic forcing is largely underrepresented in available future climate projections, which is a critical problem. The study by Man Mei Chim and Colleagues (Chim et al., 2023, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL103743) tackles this known unknown and reveals how climatically relevant volcanic activity may be stronger than currently thought in a future warmer climate, enhancing uncertainty of climate projections. The study exemplifies the profound implications of inaccuracies within simplified climate scenarios and motivates new research on volcanically forced climate variability. It also arouses some thoughts on climate uncertainty communication

Horror in Freud

El presente escrito tiene como objetivo analizar el lugar del horror en la obra freudiana. A partir de la lectura atenta de los textos pertinentes al tema, nos dedicaremos a abordar las distintas facetas del horror, su trama y presencia en la coniguración psíquica de cada sujeto. Para Freud, el horror es intrínseco a la estructuración psíquica del sujeto. Abordaremos el horror en su relación con la angustia, evidenciado en el carácter traumático de las primeras marcas. Desplegaremos la relación entre el horror y lo ominoso (lo siniestro), el interior radicalmente exterior, el placer ignorado en el síntoma, el desconocimiento como condición del ser hablante, el “saber no sabido” como lo que mueve el dispositivo analítico. Ubicaremos en el horror propio a la castración y la muerte la deinición más exacta de la trágica existencia del ser hablante. Tal recorrido, sostenido en la letra freudiana, nos permitirá ubicar el horror en el campo constitutivo del sujeto, en tanto causa y efecto de la inscripción de la palabra.The aim of this paper is to analyze the place of horror in Freud’s work. Departing from careful reading of relevant texts, we will tackle the different aspects of horror, its weave and presence in each subject’s psychic coniguration. To Freud, horror is inherent in the subject’s psychic structuring. We will approach horror as related to anguish, made evident by the traumatic nature of the irst marks. We will unfold the relation between horror and the ominous (the sinister), the radically external inner nature, the pleasure unknown in the symptom, lack of knowledge as the speaking being’s condition, “unknown knowledge” as what drives the analytical device. We will ind in horror of castration and death the most accurate deinition of the speaking being’s tragic existence. Such a path, supported by Freud’s writings, will enable us to place horror within the subject’s constitutive ield, insomuch as it is the cause and effect of verbal inscription.Fil: Zanchettin, Joceline Fatima. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Psicología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Symbolic representation of what robots are taught in one demonstration

To facilitate the use of robots in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), they have to be easily and quickly deployed by non-expert users. Programming by Demonstration (PbD) is considered a fast and intuitive approach to handle this requirement. However, one of the major drawbacks of pure PbD is that it may suffer from poor generalisation capabilities, as it is mainly capable of motion-level representations. This work proposes a method to semantically represent a demonstrated skill, so as to identify the elements of the workspace that are relevant for the characterisation of the skill itself, as well as its preconditions and effects. This way, the robot can automatically abstract from the demonstration and memorise the skill in a more general way. An experimental case study consisting in a manipulation task is reported to validate the approach

Human tracking from quantised sensors: An application to safe human–robot collaboration

The proliferation of cage-less robotic applications is justifying this research which proposes a method to process the output of safety sensors with the aim of maximising the productivity of the robot in a collaborative scenario. Particularly, the Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) strategy, which prescribes the robot to reduce its speed proportionally to the vicinity of the human, will be investigated. In state-of-the-art industrial implementations, SSM is implemented in a very conservative way, without exploiting the capabilities of modern sensing devices. This work proposes a methodology to improve the performance of SSM algorithms while dealing finite and quantised 2D cost-effective sensing capabilities. The strategy is verified experimentally as applied on a palletising application with a COMAU SMARTSix industrial robot, showing slightly improved performance with respect to standard practice