LOCATION AND SPATIAL PRICING FOR PUBLIC FACILITIES

ABSTRACT. Past analysis of public facility location has generally assumed a single goal, such as cost minimization or welfare maximization, and exogenous spatial pricing. This paper considers optimal facility location under a variety of goals. Furthermore, the facility manager is allowed to engage in freight absorption so that the delivered price to consumers need not reflect actual transportation costs. A systematic interaction among management goals, freight absorption, and the optimal size and spacing of public facilities is found.     

Political freedom in Byzantium: the rhetoric of liberty and the periodization of Roman history

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an intellectual history of the idea that the later Roman empire and, subsequently, the whole of Byzantium were less ‘free’ in comparison to the Roman Republic. Anxiety over diminished freedom recurred throughout Roman history, but only a few specific expressions of it were enshrined in modern thought as the basis on which to divide history into periods. The theorists of the Enlightenment, moreover, invented an unfree Byzantium for their own political purposes and not by examining the facts about its political culture. The second part of the paper proposes that the Byzantines valorized a model of positive freedom as legal-institutional protection against arbitrary oppressive power, including against both barbarian domination and domestic abuses. In contrast to modern thought, which tends to see the imperial position as the chief threat to liberty, the Byzantines viewed it as its bulwark. Yet they too had remedies for oppressive emperors, suggesting that the otherwise well-attested invocations of freedom were not a mere rhetorical trope for them but an actionable cultural norm.     

Is there a future for the past? An overview of archaeology in western Russia and Ukraine

The current political and economic situation in Russia and Ukraine poses grave dangers for the archaeological and museum professionals who guard these nations' legacies. At the moment that political barriers to Western collaboration were removed, new problems have crippled the post-Soviet archaeological community. Concurrently, Westerners tend to misunderstand Soviet and post-Soviet archaeological theory, forgetting that techniques such as lithic microwear and taphonomic analysis were introduced by Soviet scholars. New discoveries are described in three general categories: the origins of food-producing economies in western Russia and Ukraine, the evolution of surprisingly large towns in Copper Age Ukraine, and the origins of pastoralism in the Russian and Ukrainian steppes.     

Toward an Explanation for Public Interest Group Formation and Proliferation

Utilizing data from a survey of 60 national public interest group founders, this paper addresses two related questions: (a) What factors explain the (relatively) recent proliferation of public interest groups? (b) What factors determine in which policy areas public interest group activity is most likely? The results of the data analysis suggest that several factors have contributed to group proliferation. Among the most important are law group start-up costs, the spread of affluence and education, an increase in patron activity, and rapid societal change. The results also suggest that public interest group activity is most likely in issue areas of interest to well-educated, affluent whites. Ultimately, however, the data suggest there is bound to be a great deal of uncertainty in the public interest group universe. Because group start-up costs are so low and the entrepreneurial pod is so large and varied, virtually any type of public interest group dealing with any issue could form at any time.