Environmental Policy in an International Duopoly: An Analysis of Feedback Investment Strategies

This paper discusses environmental policy instruments in a differential-game model of international trade with oligopolistic competition. Strategic interactions occur if firms use feedback strategies and therefore react on decisions of their competitor. Eventually this harms firm profits, because all firms act strategically. A firm reacts differently if its competitor is subject to an environmental standard than if it is subject to an environmental tax. Under open-loop investment strategies and feedback strategies of energy use, environmental taxes always give rise to more investment for strategic reasons than standards. This confirms results of multistage staticmodels of the same problem. The new result is that under feedback investment strategies the reverse can be the case.Environmental policy competition;Duopoly;Differential game

Postdramatic legal theatres: space, body, media and genre

In analyses of four case studies – the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Hague Yi Jun Peace Museum, the trial of Lucia de Berk, and the French ‘Contaminated Blood Affair,’ – the dissertation shows that new forms of spatiality, corporeality, media and genre are currently breaking open, undermining and renewing the existing legal order. Scholars in the field of Law and Culture have always conceptualized law as a theatrical affair in terms of the logic of drama, a form that consolidates the legitimacy of the existing legal order. In recent years, scholars, lawyers and citizens have also been taking note of a legitimacy crisis that confronts legal institutions in our time. The dissertation argues that this crisis becomes apparent in a close reading of the forms law’s theatricality currently takes, as legal institutions are increasingly confronted with, or permeated by, a theatrical logic that theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann called the ‘postdramatic’. This is celebrated on the one hand, because of the political possibilities that might arise out of these confrontations. On the other hand, cultural responses to these legal events also make apparent a revaluation of dramatic forms. The thesis is an exercise in reading law ‘with’ artworks.NWOModern and Contemporary Studie

Reproducibility in the absence of selective reporting : An illustration from large-scale brain asymmetry research

Altres ajuts: Max Planck Society (Germany).The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p-hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multisite collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left-right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we revisited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta-analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and significance threshold. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an "ideal publishing environment," that is, free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. Reproducibility was not obviously related to the age of participants, scanner field strength, FreeSurfer software version, cortical regional measurement reliability, or regional size. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically-used sample sizes

Dichterlijke medeplichtigheid: Biopolitiek, dierlijk lijden en de materialiteit van taal in Judith Herzbergs ‘Zeesterren’

Literatuurwetenschapper Tessa de Zeeuw onderzoekt in dit artikel de dierlijke kant van biopolitiek door het filosofische concept te lezen in dialoog met het gedicht 'Zeesterren' van Judith Herzberg. Ze constateert dat dieren vaak een plek in de marge toegeschreven krijgen en dat zij, wanneer ze dan worden benoemd in de filosofie of poëzie, gevangen worden in mensentermen die hen hun dierlijkheid ontnemen. Is er een manier om over dieren te spreken en schrijven zonder deze misstap te begaan? Middels haar grondige analyse van 'Zeesterren' weet De Zeeuw niet alleen kanttekeningen te plaatsen bij de theoretische uitwerking van biopolitiek, maar zet ze ook de eerste stappen in de richting van een taal die de machtsproblematiek kan ontstijgen.Modern and Contemporary Studie

Ethics of Becoming as a Frame for Ethics: Theatricality and Balance in Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover

This article reads Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover for the way it deals with the relation between justice and desire. The authors discuss how the film portrays, on the one hand, a desire for justice that seeks a theatrical mode of legal procedure in the form of a rule of law that is systematically ethical; and on the other hand, desire as justice as the expression of what Gilles Deleuze called the “ethics of becoming.” The two forms are brought in tension in the film’s final scene, which can be read either as a case presented to the viewer as audience in the judicial theatre, or as a feud that plays out on what the authors read as a Brechtian podium, a space characterized by its radical openness and accessibility. On the podium the procedure is not structured by an audience that needs to watch the proceedings as a check on its fairness, but in which the audience actively participates in determining the situation. Through formal, cinematographic elements, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover brings these two modes of desire and justice, and the ethical, theatrical and procedural forms they imply, in tension with one another. It makes the film a crucial jurisprudential text.Modern and Contemporary Studie