The story of Oh: the aesthetics and rhetoric of a common vowel sound

Studies in Musical Theatre is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to musical theatre. It was launched in 2007 and is now in its seventh volume. It has an extensive international readership and is edited by Dominic Symonds and George Burrows. This article investigates the use of the ‘word’ ‘Oh’ in a variety of different performance idioms. Despite its lack of ‘meaning’, the sound is used in both conversation and poetic discourse, and I discuss how it operates communicatively and expressively through contextual resonances, aesthetic manipulation and rhetorical signification. The article first considers the aesthetically modernist work of Cathy Berberian in Bussotti’s La Passion Selon Sade; then it considers the rhetorically inflected use of ‘Oh’ to construct social resonance in popular song;finally, it discusses two important uses of the sound ‘Oh’ which bookend the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, serving to consolidate the allegorical and musico-dramatic narrative of the show

Optimizing Voluntary Deforestation Policy in the Face of Adverse Selection and Costly Transfers

As part of international climate change policy, voluntary opt-in programs to reduce emissions in unregulated sectors or countries have spurred considerable discussion. Since any regulator will make errors in predicting baselines, adverse selection will reduce efficiency since participants will self-select into the program. In contrast, pure subsidies lead to full participation but require large financial transfers; this is a particular challenge across countries. A global social planner facing costless transfers would choose such a subsidy to maximize efficiency. However, any actual policy needs to be individually rational for both the buying (industrialized) and selling (developing) country. We present a simple model to analyze this trade-off between adverse selection and infra-marginal transfers. The model leads to the following findings. First, extending the scale of voluntary programs both improves efficiency and reduces transfers. Second, the set of individually rational and Pareto efficient policies typically features a combination of credit discounting and stringent assigned baselines which reduce efficiency. Third, if the industrialized countries can be persuaded to be more generous, the feasible policy set can come close to the globally efficient policy to avoid deforestation..Voluntary opt-in; adverse selection; deforestation; offsets; emissions trading; REDD

A New Game Equivalence and its Modal Logic

We revisit the crucial issue of natural game equivalences, and semantics of game logics based on these. We present reasons for investigating finer concepts of game equivalence than equality of standard powers, though staying short of modal bisimulation. Concretely, we propose a more finegrained notion of equality of "basic powers" which record what players can force plus what they leave to others to do, a crucial feature of interaction. This notion is closer to game-theoretic strategic form, as we explain in detail, while remaining amenable to logical analysis. We determine the properties of basic powers via a new representation theorem, find a matching "instantial neighborhood game logic", and show how our analysis can be extended to a new game algebra and dynamic game logic.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2017, arXiv:1707.0825

Optimizing Voluntary Deforestation Policy in the Face of Adverse Selection and Costly Transfers

As part of international climate change policy, voluntary opt-in programs to reduce emissions in unregulated sectors or countries have spurred considerable discussion. Since any regulator will make errors in predicting baselines, adverse selection will reduce efficiency since participants will self-select into the program. In contrast, pure subsidies lead to full participation but require large financial transfers; this is a particular challenge across countries. A global social planner facing costless transfers would choose such a subsidy to maximize efficiency. However, any actual policy needs to be individually rational for both the buying (industrialized) and selling (developing) country. We present a simple model to analyze this trade-off between adverse selection and infra-marginal transfers. The model leads to the following findings. First, extending the scale of voluntary programs both improves efficiency and reduces transfers. Second, the set of individually rational and Pareto efficient policies typically features a combination of credit discounting and stringent assigned baselines which reduce efficiency. Third, if the industrialized countries can be persuaded to be more generous, the feasible policy set can come close to the globally efficient policy to avoid deforestation.Voluntary opt-in, adverse selection, deforestation, offsets, emissions trading, REDD, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Q54, Q56,

Bigger is Better: Avoided Deforestation Offsets in the Face of Adverse Selection

Voluntary opt-in programs to reduce emissions in unregulated sectors or countries have spurred considerable discussion. Since any regulator will make errors in predicting baselines and participants will self-select into the program, adverse selection will reduce efficiency and possibly environmental integrity. In contrast, pure subsidies lead to full participation but require large financial transfers. We present a simple model to analyze this trade-off between adverse selection and infra-marginal transfers. We find that increasing the scale of voluntary programs both improves efficiency and reduces transfers. We show that discounting (paying less than full value for offsets) is inefficient and cannot be used to reduce the fraction of offsets that are spurious while setting stringent baselines generally can. Both approaches reduce the cost to the offsets buyer. The effects of two popular policy options are less favorable than many believe: Limiting the number of offsets that can be one-for-one exchanged with permits in a cap-and-trade system will lower the offset price but also quality. Trading ratios between offsets and allowances have ambiguous environmental effects if the cap is not properly adjusted. This paper frames the issues in terms of avoiding deforestation but the results are applicable to any voluntary offset program.Environmental Economics and Policy, deforestation, offsets, adverse selection, REDD, climate change policy, opt-in.,

Evidence and plausibility in neighborhood structures

The intuitive notion of evidence has both semantic and syntactic features. In this paper, we develop an {\em evidence logic} for epistemic agents faced with possibly contradictory evidence from different sources. The logic is based on a neighborhood semantics, where a neighborhood $N$ indicates that the agent has reason to believe that the true state of the world lies in $N$. Further notions of relative plausibility between worlds and beliefs based on the latter ordering are then defined in terms of this evidence structure, yielding our intended models for evidence-based beliefs. In addition, we also consider a second more general flavor, where belief and plausibility are modeled using additional primitive relations, and we prove a representation theorem showing that each such general model is a $p$-morphic image of an intended one. This semantics invites a number of natural special cases, depending on how uniform we make the evidence sets, and how coherent their total structure. We give a structural study of the resulting `uniform' and `flat' models. Our main result are sound and complete axiomatizations for the logics of all four major model classes with respect to the modal language of evidence, belief and safe belief. We conclude with an outlook toward logics for the dynamics of changing evidence, and the resulting language extensions and connections with logics of plausibility change

Unintended Consequences from Nested State & Federal Regulations: The Case of the Pavley Greenhouse-Gas-per-Mile Limits

Fourteen U.S. states recently pledged to adopt limits on greenhouse gases (GHGs) per mile of light-duty automobiles. Previous analyses predicted that these limits will yield significant reductions in GHGs. However, these studies did not consider critical factors that imply different results. This paper develops a multi-period numerical simulation model that accounts for these factors in assessing the impact of the proposed GHG-per-mile standards on U.S. gasoline consumption and GHG emissions. We find that while the state-level initiative would reduce significantly the emissions associated with new cars in the adopting states, it would give rise to very significant offsetting increases (“leakage”) elsewhere, in both new and used car markets. Because of interactions with the federal CAFE standard, technology spillovers mitigate leakage only slightly. In the most plausible scenarios considered, the leakage is around 70 percent. Correspondingly, the cost per gallon saved under the GHG-per-mile limits is about 72 percent higher than for an equivalent increase in the federal CAFE standard.greenhouse gases, environmental regulations, renewable energy, cars

Logic, Rational Agency, and Intelligent Interaction

... make a plea for recasting logic as a theory of interactive agency, and show how this perspective fits both old achievements and new broader ambitions for the field