Facility Location Under Zone Pricing

Zone pricing consists in determining simultaneously several delivered prices together with the zones where these prices apply. A model and algorithm are proposed to determine optimal facility locations, prices, tariff-zones, and market areas in order to maximize the firm's profit under zone pricing. The resulting nonlinear mixed-integer program is tackled by projecting the objective function on the price space, solving repeatedly uncapacitated facility location problems for fixed values of the prices. The implicit profit function so defined is optimized by branch-and-bound. Computational results are reported.     

Thinking Through Networks and Their Spatiality: A Critique of the US (Public) War on Terrorism and its Geographic Discourse

Conventional thinking about war is encumbered by an inappropriate geographic paradigm that conceptualizes "targets" in terms of fixed latitudinal/longitudinal locations. This paper reconceptualizes terms such as "war" and "targets" to recognize intangible problems and develop appropriate counter‐terrorist strategies. This requires geographic inquiry focused on spatiality, not on location. We frame our discussion about terrorist networks (Al‐Qaeda in particular) in terms of understanding a network's sense of place and sense of space . The former "places" a network's meeting and recruiting grounds; the latter clarifies the operational dynamics of a network across space, at different scales, from the body to the neighborhood, to the region, and across nations. We argue that the roots of terrorism lie in conditions of disenfranchisement in particular types of places, understanding, however, that the socio‐cultural fabric of a terrorist network such as Al‐Qaeda evolves across space as well as time. Counter‐terrorist strategies should target neither people nor places but rather the conditions that give rise to terrorism; further, "intelligence" should focus on network dynamics, beyond particular people in particular places. We draw from network theories (specifically actor network theory and network approaches in economic sociology) to unravel network dynamics, and we draw from the literature on spatiality to interpret such dynamics in space, over time. We advocate a non‐military engagement with terrorism on both moral and strategic grounds; here we focus on the strategic dimension, the value of which has received scant attention.     

Location and Pricing Decisions of a MultiStore Monopoly in a Spatial Market

Abstract.  This article presents an analysis of location and pricing decisions of a monopolist about to open several stores in a compact geographical space. The number of stores is made endogenous by the introduction of fixed costs. A novel methodology is developed, by which the firm's location and price decisions are represented as continuous functions defined over the geographical space. This modeling artifact generates a negligible error but simplifies the solution considerably and allows the derivation of several intuitive results. Although the focus is on one‐dimensional markets, it is shown that the method can easily be adapted to two‐dimensional markets.     

The changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector in metropolitan and rural regions, 1976–1997

This paper documents the changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector over a 22‐year period (1976–1997). It does so by looking at the shifts in employment and differences in production worker wages across different levels of the rural/urban hierarchy—central cities, adjacent suburbs, medium and small cities and rural areas. The analysis demonstrates that the most dramatic shifts in manufacturing employment were from the central cities of large metropolitan regions to their suburbs. Paralleling trends in the United States, rural regions of Canada have increased their share of manufacturing employment. Rising rural employment shares were due to declining employment shares of small cities and, to a lesser degree, large urban regions. Increasing rural employment was particularly prominent in Quebec, where employment shifted away from the Montreal region. The changing fortunes of rural and urban areas were not the result of across‐the‐board shifts in manufacturing employment, but were the net outcome of differing locational patterns across industries. In contrast to the situation in the United States, wages in Canada do not consistently decline, moving down the rural/urban hierarchy from the largest cities to the most rural parts of the country. Only after controlling for the types of manufacturing industries found in rural and urban regions is it apparent that wages decline with the size of place .     

SPATIAL ASYMMETRIC DUOPOLY WITH AN APPLICATION TO BRUSSELS' AIRPORTS*

ABSTRACT In this paper, the problem of a city with access to two firms or facilities (shopping malls, airports, commercial districts) selling a differentiated product (shopping, flights) and/or offering a differentiated workplace is studied. Transport connections to one facility are congested. A model is presented for this asymmetric duopoly game that can be solved for a Nash equilibrium in prices and wages. A comparative statics analysis is used to illustrate the properties of the equilibrium. A numerical model is then applied to the two Brussels airports. Three stylized policies are implemented to address the congestion problem: expansion of transport capacity, congestion pricing, and a direct subsidy to the uncongested facility. Our results indicate that the degree of intrinsic differentiation between the two firms is crucial in determining the difference in profit and market share. Price and wage differences also depend on trip frequency and consumer preferences for diversity. Congestion pricing is the most effective policy tool but all three options are shown to have attractive attributes.     

PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION,PRICING POLICY AND EQUILIBRIUM*

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the price-location equilibrium of duopolists supplying differentiated goods and competing in a spatial market with elastic demand. We show that a price-location equilibrium exists under all three pricing policies traditionally considered by the literature: f.o.b. mill, uniform delivered, and spatially discriminatory pricing. We also show that firms always cluster at the market center. The second part of the paper studies the endogenous choice of pricing policy. A surprising feature of the resulting equilibrium is asymmetry. The greater the extent to which the goods are substitutes, the more likely is it that one firm will choose f.o.b. pricing and the other price discrimination. Finally, the welfare consequences of the analysis show some interesting trade-offs.     

URBAN GROWTH EXTERNALITIES AND NEIGHBORHOOD INCENTIVES: ANOTHER CAUSE OF URBAN SPRAWL?*

ABSTRACT This paper suggests a cause of low density urban development or urban sprawl that has not been given much attention in the literature. There have been a number of arguments put forward for market failures that may account for urban sprawl, including incomplete pricing of infrastructure, environmental externalities, and unpriced congestion. The problem analyzed here is that urban growth creates benefits for an entire urban area, but the costs of growth are borne by individual neighborhoods. An externality problem arises because existing residents perceive the costs associated with the new residents locating in their neighborhoods, but not the full benefits of new entrants which accrue to the city as a whole. The result is that existing residents have an incentive to block new residents to their neighborhoods, resulting in cities that are less dense than is optimal, or too spread out. The paper models several different types of urban growth, and examines the optimal and local choice outcomes under each type. In the first model, population growth is endogenous and the physical limits of the city are fixed. The second model examines the case in which population growth in the region is given, but the city boundary is allowed to vary. We show that in both cases the city will tend to be larger and less dense than is optimal. In each, we examine the sensitivity of the model to the number of neighborhoods and to the size of infrastructure and transportation costs. Finally, we examine optimal subsidies and see how they compare to current policies such as impact fees on new development.     

MILL AND UNIFORM PRICING A COMPARISON*

ABSTRACT. In this paper we examine profit, price, output and welfare under mill and uniform pricing in a monopolistic spatial market with nonlinear demand, a general consumer distribution function, and a general transportation cost function. We show that if demand is convex (concave) then the optimal uniform price minus the average unit transportation cost is lower (higher) than the optimal mill price, output under uniform pricing is lower (higher) than output under mill pricing, and welfare under uniform pricing is lower (higher) than welfare under mill pricing, provided other respective conditions are satisfied.     

Regional Labor Market Dynamics, Housing, and Migration

Abstract.  This study explores the impact of plant‐level labor market dynamics and housing markets on gross migration flows. The internal and the external reorganizations of regional labor markets are shown to be related. An increase in internal turnover of jobs and workers in regional labor markets is found to increase net‐migration. This effect arises mainly from a reduction in out‐migration. Housing markets constitute constraints for migration. In particular, an increase in regional housing prices and a large share of owner‐occupancy housing discourages net‐migration to a region by reducing in‐migration. In contrast, the out‐migration rate remains largely unaffected by housing markets.     

Resisting and Challenging Neoliberalism: The Development of Italian Social Centers

In the 1970s, Italy experienced a difficult transition from Fordism to a flexible accumulation regime. The resulting changes in production relations led to the disappearance of traditional public spaces and meeting places such as open squares, workplaces, party offices or the premises of groups involved in the antagonistic, ie anti‐capitalist and anti‐fascist, movement. Within this context, in the 1980s and 1990s, these groups managed to create new social and political spaces by setting up Self‐Managed Social Centers (CSAs), ie squatted properties which became the venue of social, political and cultural events. Over 250 Social Centers have been active in Italy over the past 15 years, especially in urban areas. Their organizational modes are examples of successful direct democracy in non‐hierarchical structures and may provide alternative options to the bureaucratic organization of so many aspects of social and political life. Point number one on a Social Center's agenda is a daunting task: it must renovate and refurbish privately or publicly owned empty properties and turn them into public spaces open to the general public. For this task it relies exclusively on collective action, ie cooperative working modes which do not come under the provisions governing regular employment contracts and can thus be used to combat marginalization and exclusion processes which are becoming more and more dramatic in our cities. An analysis of the evolution of this original Italian movement provides the opportunity to address a number of issues associated with alternative practices to neoliberal globalization.     

Spatial Pricing Policies Reconsidered: Monopoly Performance and Location

This paper reexamines the welfare implications of three pricing regimes (mill, uniform, and discriminatory) for a monopoly. Assuming linear demand and constant marginal costs, I show that with the introduction of endogenous location choice, uniform delivered pricing may provide the highest social welfare when demands in different markets are sufficiently heterogeneous; whereas discriminatory pricing always dominates uniform pricing when demands in different markets are similar.     

Making Space for “Neo‐communitarianism”? The Third Sector,State and Civil Society in the UK

During the 1990s the urban became an important "institutional laboratory" for state‐initiated policy experiments to address the social costs and political repercussions of economic polarisation and social exclusion associated with neo‐liberalism. One such policy experiment has been neo‐communitarianism, emphasising the contribution of the "third sector" to improving social welfare and reinvigorating a sense of civil society. Focusing on the UK, I examine the background to and implications of the emergence of a neo‐communitarian strategy under the "new" Labour government, which came to power in 1997. First, I consider the repositioning of the third sector within contemporary policy discourse as a result of the Labour government's programme of welfare reforms and Prime Minister Blair's "Third Way" political philosophy, which attempts to combine neo‐liberalism with a neo‐communitarian stance of stressing the importance of civil society for social cohesion. Then, I draw on Foucauldian notions of governmentality to examine how Labour's neo‐communitarian agenda has involved a fundamental reconfiguration of the governance of the third sector, centred on the creation of government–voluntary sector "compacts" at national and local levels. These compacts are of strategic importance for the restructuring of the UK third sector and so the local implications of such restructuring are then considered. In particular, case study evidence from Glasgow is used to critically evaluate government claims that the third sector can contribute to the "reinvigoration of civic life" by highlighting the importance of the internal characteristics and political environment of local third sector organisations for the differential development of social capital and citizenship.     

UNIFORM SPATIAL PRICING

ABSTRACT Uniform spatial pricing means that a firm delivers its product to any customer at a fixed price, independent of location. Economic theory explains the use of uniform pricing by the added profit generated by absorbing freight charges of distant customers. I extend this insight by demonstrating that when demand elasticity and transportation cost are positively enough correlated, uniform pricing generates higher profits than mill pricing. I show that this result can better explain observed patterns of price policy choice by mail order and web firms. A second result is application of this idea to firms with many shipping facilities.     

Prospecting for Economic Returns to Research: Adding Informational Value at the Market Fringe

Abstract.  Private markets constantly assess project investment opportunities across a spectrum of such possibilities. The market's perspective on the boundary of viable projects, however, may be more limited than socially optimal due to informational constraints. In the case of economic development projects in particular, this boundary could be extended by public researchers. This paper constructs a method to estimate the private and social value‐added of such research, providing a new means to understand and assess the public/private sector interface. The framework uses agents' evolving subjective perceptions through Bayesian updating to value research information, along with methods to estimate functional forms and relative optima. Two case studies of regional development research on value‐added agriculture in Colorado highlight the utility of the approach.     

ANTIAGGLOMERATION SUBSIDIES WITH HETEROGENEOUS FIRMS*

ABSTRACT This paper studies antiagglomeration subsidies in a core–periphery setting when firms are heterogeneous in labor productivity, focusing on the effects of a relocation subsidy on firm location in various tax‐financing schemes (local vs. global). I discuss how a subsidy can enhance welfare and average productivity in the periphery. As a result, I find that a subsidy proportional to profits can induce the relocation of high‐productivity firms and thus increase welfare and average productivity in the periphery. Concerning tax‐financing schemes, a local tax‐financing scheme has an optimal level of subsidy.     

Anti‐corporate Campaigning and Corporate “Social” Responsibility: Towards Alternative Spaces of Citizenship?1

This paper seeks to bring together debates on anti‐corporate protest with discussions on the nature of corporate responsibility. It does so in order to examine the implications of this interaction between conflicting social forces for the constitution of citizenship on the one hand, and for an understanding of the corporation on the other. I first identify the significance of anti‐corporate activism within the current anti‐globalisation movement. The proclaimed emergence of an era of corporate citizenship is then examined. The spaces of engagement between anti‐corporate activism and corporate social responsibility are constructed through a variety of means, including ethical trading initiatives and corporate codes of conduct. In interpreting these engagements, I identify three contrasting perspectives on the spaces of citizenship that might result. These stress in turn the turbulence of a global civil society, the re‐definition of the national state, and the spatial discontinuities of democracy. I also situate corporate social responsibility practices as part of the discursive narrative of the corporate form, enabling a consideration of the extent to which it is potentially possible to de‐centre the corporation.     

1952～1954年湖北省农村私人借贷的历史考察

私人借贷在全国解放前一直是农村金融体系的重要组成部分.解放以后,从1952～1954年湖北省的调查材料来看,由于经济落后、家庭经济弱小、缺乏完善的社会保障和现代金融体系等原因,农村的私人借贷虽受到抑制但仍有一定的发展,与解放以前相比,这一时期的私人借贷形式较为简化,利率较低,功能上也以互助互济为主.国家银行业务在农村的延伸和农村信用社等现代金融组织的发展在一定程度上压缩了私人借贷的空间,但并不能完全替代私人借贷.     

Youth transitions: mobility and the travel intentions of 12–20 year olds,Reading, UK

ABSTRACT

Whilst Western societies may have reached ‘peak car’, young people are arguably the most significant group whose levels of car ownership, use and driving licence acquisition have declined. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses qualitative research conducted in Reading, UK, considering young people’s (aged 12–20) views about bus travel. Whilst current pricing structures (both in Reading and across the UK) often offer under 18s discounted travel, the paper explores young people’s intentions about future travel as young adults. Drawing upon theorisations around youth transitions, we discuss how young people expect their mobility patterns to change as young adults in complex, shifting, fluid ways, and to involve multi-modal travel. Young people construct complex choice biographies through which they plan pathways to navigate these mobility transitions. Although a small-scale study, this paper also offers some insights into the challenges, complexities and limitations of researching mobility intention.     

From 'black‐balling' to 'marking': the suburban origin of redlining in Canada, 1930s–1950s

Redlining occurs where institutional mortgage lending is the norm and where lenders decline to loan in specific areas. The term originated during the 1930s in the United States, where it was promoted by federal agencies and acquired racial connotations. Recently, redlining has been uncommon in Canada, but contemporary reports, archival records and parliamentary debates show it was widespread from the 1930s to the 1950s. Contemporaries distinguished the 'black‐balling' of remote areas, where it was impossible to make loans, from the 'marking' of districts in urban areas where companies could lend but chose not to do so. Only the latter can be regarded as redlining. As defined by Canadian housing agencies, most 'marked' areas were in unregulated, owner‐built suburbs that lacked services. The suburban origin of redlining in Canada had little to do with the distribution of ethnic minorities. As long as it lasted, roughly until the late 1950s, it perpetuated social class diversity in Canadian suburbs.     

Protected Areas,Country and Value: The Nature–Culture Tyranny of the IUCN's Protected Area Guidelines for Indigenous Australians

“Protected areas” is the formal definition for the global network of conservation places, including marine and terrestrial reserves, which are overseen by the IUCN through instruments such as the Guidelines for Applying Protected Area Management Categories (Guidelines). In the long‐term conservation of nature, the Guidelines embed a nature–culture dualism, upon which the values of each are ascribed and weighted. This binary does not recognise relational values of Indigenous peoples to land or encompass worldviews beyond the restricted choice of the dualism. Through two Australian Aboriginal case studies, I reveal tensions in classifying cultural values for protected areas under the limited Guidelines offerings and provide an alternative engagement, through reassessing the means and scope by which values are assigned, for greater equity to Indigenous peoples.