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Singapore Songlines: Revisited: The world class complex and the multiple deaths of context
Full text linkA part-biographical, part-historical and part-polemical essay, this study revisits Rem Koolhaas’s classic meditation on Singapore’s natural and built environment in the post-independence era. Building on Koolhaas’s provocative depiction of Singapore as an architectural and environmental tabula rasa, it delves deeper into the twentieth-century modernist conditions which produced the post-independence city state’s decontextualized urban landscape. In doing so, this essay argues that Singapore city-making state policies have resulted from more than an official ideology of pragmatism. Rather, they contain with in them an official poetics with which independent creatives in this city must contend with and negotiate. An analysis of these poetics, embodied in the way the government has projected Singapore’s official image of itself, reveals its pervasive preoccupation with ‘the global’ and its wilful desire to liberate Singapore from the constraints of history through creative urban destruction
Price Competition and Market Structure: The Impact of Restrictive Practices Legislation on Concentration in the UK (Revised version pubished in Journal of Industrial Economics, vol.48 (March 2000), pp.1-26)
No full textThis paper examines the impact of firms' conduct on market structure. It studies the evolution of concentration in UK manufacturing following the abolition of cartels using a theoretical framework based on Sutton's theory of market structure and a panel data set for four-digit industries over 1958-1977. The econometric results suggest that the intensity of price competition has a positive impact on concentration in exogenous sunk cost industries as well as in advertising-intensive and R&D-intensive industries. The concentration-market size relationship, while negative in exogenous sunk cost industries, breaks down in industries with high advertising or R&D-intensity
Long-run equilibria, dominated strategies, and local interactions
No full textThe present note revisits a result by Kim and Wong
(2010) showing that any strict Nash equilibrium of a coordination
game can be supported as a long run equilibrium by properly adding
dominated strategies. We show that in the circular city model of
local interactions the selection of 1/2 -dominant strategies remains
when adding strictly dominated strategies if interaction is decentral".
Conversely, if the local interaction structure is central" by
adding properly suited dominated strategies any equilibrium strategy
of the original game can be supported as long run equilibrium.
Classification- JEL: C72, D8
Imitation and the Evolution of Walrasian Behavior: Theoretically Fragile but Behaviorally Robust
No full textA well-known result by Vega-Redondo implies that in symmetric
Cournot oligopoly, imitation leads to the Walrasian outcome where
price equals marginal cost. In this paper we show that this result
is not robust to the slightest asymmetry in fixed costs. Instead of
obtaining the Walrasian outcome as unique prediction, every outcome
where agents choose identical actions will be played some fraction of
the time in the long run. We then conduct experiments to check this
fragility. We obtain that, contrary to the theoretical prediction, the
Walrasian outcome is still a good predictor of behavior
Labour as a Buffer: Do Temporary Workers Suffer?
No full textIn this paper, we investigate whether or not there is an equal opportunities dimension to
regulating equal pay and conditions for temporary work. We develop a “buffer stock” model
of temporary work that suggests a number of reasons why ethnic minorities and women may
be more likely to be on fixed-term contracts than comparable white males. Using three
different British datasets (a random representative survey of households and two data sets of
specific labour market groups), we then estimate the degree to which women and/or ethnic
minorities are more likely to be on temporary contracts and estimate any associated wage
differentials
Modeling retail browsing sessions and wearables data
Full text linkThe advent of wearable non-invasive sensors for the consumer market has made it cost-effective to conduct studies that integrate physiological measures such as heart rate into data analysis research. In this paper we investigate the predictive value of heart rate measurements from a commercial wrist wearable device in the context of e-commerce. We look into a dataset comprised of browser-logs and wearables data from 28 individuals in a field experiment over a period of ten days. We are particularly interested in finding predictors for starting a retail session, such as the heart rate at the beginning of a web browsing session. We describe preprocessing tasks applied to the dataset and logistic regression and survival analysis models to retrieve the probability of starting a retail browsing session. Preliminary results show that heart rate has a significant predictive value on starting a retail session if we consider increased and decreased heart rate individual values and the time of day
Cognitive Development and Infectious Disease: Gender Differences in Investments and Outcomes
No full textWe exploit exogenous variation in the risk of waterborne disease created by implementation of a major water reform in Mexico in 1991 to investigate impacts of infant exposure on indicators of cognitive development and academic achievement in late childhood. We estimate that a one standard deviation reduction in childhood diarrhea mortality rates results in about a 0.1 standard deviation increase in test scores, but only for girls. We show that a reason for the gender differentiated impacts is that the water reform induces parents to make complementary investments in education that favor girls, consistent with their comparative advantage in skilled occupations. The results provide novel evidence of the potential for clean water provision to narrow test score gaps across countries and, within countries, across gender
