How the U.S. Treasury should auction its debt

The U.S. Treasury could raise more revenue if it changed the way it auctions its debt. Under the current procedure, all bidders whose competitive bids for Treasury securities are accepted pay the prices they bid; different winning bidders, that is, pay different prices. Instead, economic theory says, all winning bidders should all pay the same price—that of the highest bid not accepted, or the price that just clears the market. This procedural change would increase the revenue that Treasury auctions raise primarily because it would decrease the amount of resources that bidders would spend collecting information about what other bidders are likely to do. It would also reduce the incentives for traders to attempt to manipulate the securities market.Government securities

Development of battery separator composites

Improved inorganic-organic separators developed by NASA were commercially prepared. A single-ply asbestos substrate was developed, as well as alternative substrates based on cellulose and on polypropylene fibers. The single-ply asbestos was bound with butyl rubber and was functionally superior to the formerly used polyphenylene oxide saturated sheet. Commercially prepared separators exhibited better measured separator properties than the NASA standard. Cycle life in Ni/Zn and Ag/Zn cells was related to substrate, decreasing in the order; asbestos cellulose paper nonwoven polypropylene. The cycle life of solvent-coated separators was better than aqueous in Ni/Zn cells, while aqueous coatings were better in Ag/Zn cells

Information Independence and Common Knowledge

Conditions of information independence are important in information economics and game theory. We present notions of partial independence in Bayesian environments, and study their relationships to notions of common knowledge.Bayesian games, independent types, common knowledgees

Information Independence and Common Knowledge

In Bayesian environments with private information, as described by the types of Harsanyi, how can types of agents be (statistically) disassociated from each other and how are such disassociations reflected in the agents’ knowledge structure? Conditions studied are (i) subjective independence (the opponents’ types are independent conditional on one’s own) and (ii) type disassociation under common knowledge (the agents’ types are independent, conditional on some common-knowledge variable). Subjective independence is motivated by its implications in Bayesian games and in studies of equilibrium concepts. We find that a variable that disassociates types is more informative than any common-knowledge variable. With three or more agents, conditions (i) and (ii) are equivalent. They also imply that any variable which is common knowledge to two agents is common knowledge to all, and imply the existence of a unique common-knowledge variable that disassociates types, which is the one defined by Aumann.Bayesian games, independent types, common knowledge.

Against Discourse: Why Eliminating Racial Disparities Requires Radical Politics, Not More Discussion

Racial disparity discourse is one of the main modalities through which we discuss and experience race and racism in the United States today—in discussions with colleagues and friends, in scholarly work, on cable news, on social media, and in lecture halls. Despite its ubiquity, racial disparity discourse is under-theorized: what, exactly, is its intended purpose? This Essay argues that most discussion about racial disparities is predicated on the faulty premise—grounded in the Habermasian concepts of discourse and communicative rationality—that antiracists will convince their interlocutors by engaging in a practice of rationalistic discourse among participants who share the objective and expectation of consensus. Drawing on the work of political philosopher Charles Mills and sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Moon-Kie Jung, the Essay explains why the pragmatic conditions of possibility for discourse of this sort concerning matters related to race in the United States are frequently absent. Specifically, Mills theorizes that a “racial contract,” saturated with racialized hierarchies and subordinating logics, has always underwritten the American social contract, leaving in its wake an “epistemology of ignorance” that is today responsible for localized and global cognitive dysfunctions. Jung develops Bourdieu’s concept of doxa to explain how, when it comes to the politics of race in the United States, individual agency and actions are always mediated by a classificatory, schematic, and hierarchical social structure in which race frequently plays a decisive organizing role. This Essay concludes by recommending that those committed to redressing vulnerability, precarity, and disposability along racialized lines should not focus their efforts on cobbling together a transracial coalition of the discursively convinced. Instead, it is argued that attentional and financial resources are better directed to develop and reinvigorate a radical, oppositional politics dedicated to eradicating racialized hierarchies and those elements of the political economy that reciprocally nurture and feed off them. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s model of “agonistic pluralism,” which centers the irreducibly conflictual nature of modern politics and proposes a politics that aims to confront and convert rather than to convince, is offered as a fruitful theoretical model to underwrite this non-discursive, radical politics