Impure Public Goods, Relative Gains, and International Cooperation

The characterization of the products of international cooperation as public goods has been severely challenged, undermining a central pillar of theories of international cooperation. I review the criticism of public goods assumptions, identifying the need to account for both exclusion and rival consumption in international cooperative arrangements. Drawing on the recent debate of states as relative versus absolute gains maximizers, I offer a characterization of international cooperative arrangements as discriminatory clubs. I develop a refined relative gains model, which focuses on relative net gains, and apply it to a hypothetical situation to illustrate its usefulness in predicting patterns of exclusion and distribution in international trade.     

Continuity and change in Norman Italy: the Campania during the eleventh and twelfth centuries

The Campania was a fertile area, with a growing population during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and was economically more advanced than most of the rest of southern Italy. This essay examines the impact of the Norman conquest of the south upon this region, with special reference to the settlement pattern and the aristocracy. It concludes that the role of incastellamento in changing the pattern of settlement was relatively limited, and the extensive incastellamento of the Montecassino lands (a product of Norman pressure upon the abbey) cannot be taken as typical. Furthermore, while the Norman conquest led to colonisation by French aristocrats, this did not entirely displace existing Lombard families, and widespread intermarriage led to a blurring of the distinction between Lombards and Normans. The impact of political crises during the twelfth century was also more limited than might be supposed, and continuity rather than change characterised the nobility of the Norman period.     

Locating Vehicle Inspection Stations to Protect a Transportation Network

We develop a new conceptual approach to locating inspection stations for hazardous vehicles, prevention, and compare it to the previous, punitive, philosophy of the flow-capturing location model. We implement this preventive protection philosophy with a new mixed integer program that maximizes hazard avoidance by locating a number of inspection stations to detect and remove hazardous vehicles as early in their trips as possible. We test the model's performance and analyze the spatial characteristics of solutions simulating several potential applications. Our computations demonstrate that a relaxed integer-linear program is overly demanding computationally and that a simple greedy heuristic lacks robustness. We suggest further approaches to developing more powerful and efficient solution methods.     

TECHNICAL STUDY OF A CEREMONIAL SICAN TUMI FIGURINE

Examination of a Sican ceremonial tumi, dated to the Middle Sican, c. AD 850–1050, showed that it was made in a silver-copper alloy of approximate composition 93% silver, 6% copper. Many separate pieces are used in the construction, joined together by both mechanical methods and by solder. The principal figure has been made from 18 separate silver sheets, with 169 separate parts identified in the head-dress, totalling 187 design elements. Metallographic examination of a fragment of repoussé decorated sheet from the figure surmounting the tumi surprisingly showed that the silver-copper alloy has a cast morphology; this demonstrates that Sican metalsmiths were pre-casting silver-copper sheet into the dimensions required for making the tumi, rather than carrying out the expected process of making the idol from hammered silver-copper sheet, shaped by extensive cycles of working and annealing, thus contradicting the usual assumptions about the manufacture of sheet-metalwork made in such cases.