Pricing, Capacity Choice, and Financing in Transportation Networks

Abstract.  This paper explores interrelations between pricing, capacity choice, and financing in transportation networks. We build on the Mohring‐Harwitz result on self‐financing of optimally designed and priced roads and investigate it in a network environment under various types of second‐best regulation. A small network model with endogenous car ownership demonstrates that optimal congestion pricing and capacity choice over an entire network may cause user prices to increase more in initially mildly congested areas compared to heavily congested areas. Furthermore, a flat kilometer charge under optimal capacity choice may result in first‐best efficiency gains.     

Hierarchical Integration: The Dollar Economy and the Rupee Economy

While contemporary globalization makes the world more interconnected, it also reworks and builds on existing cleavages and uneven development. This is an under‐researched dimension of the emerging twenty‐first century international division of labour. The core question is whether new developments (associated with exports, offshoring and outsourcing) spin off to the majority in the countryside and the urban poor. This article examines the relationship between the dollar economy and the rupee economy in India. It documents the ways in which inequality is built into and sustains India's development. The authors discuss other instances of multi‐speed economies and analytics that seek to come to grips with these relations, from combined and uneven development to global value chains. They present three ways of capturing contemporary inequality: asymmetric inclusion, enlargement‐and‐containment and hierarchical integration, each of which captures different dimensions of inequality.     

SOCIAL NETWORKS AND THE CONVERGENCE OF POPULATION ATTRIBUTES: A GENERALIZATION

ABSTRACT.  Analysis of social interactions has recently become an important area of economic research, and the focus of researchers in this area has increasingly shifted toward dynamic models. In one recent contribution, Brueckner and Smirnov (2007) analyze the evolution of population attributes in an exceedingly simple model, where an agent's attributes at time t are equal to the average attribute value among his acquaintances. The pattern of acquaintances in the population is determined by the social network, and Brueckner and Smirnov (BS) explore the effect of network characteristics on the convergence of population attributes over time. They show that some simple sufficient conditions on the network structure ensure convergence to a "melting-pot" equilibrium where attributes are uniform across agents. The present paper provides a generalization of BS's analysis, allowing for a more general form of the rule governing the evolution of population attributes. The analysis shows that BS's previous conclusions continue to hold under this generalization, while also providing a result that can be applied more generally to other models.     

The Effect of Social Networks on Resource Access and Business Start-ups

In previous research, entrepreneurs' social networks are expected to influence entrepreneurial success because they give access to resources. This is confirmed in this study. In most research it is also believed that network features such as strength of ties determine to a great extent what kind of resources the entrepreneur receives. Although this last assumption has important implications for entrepreneurship research and for practice, the validity of the assumption has not been put to the test in previous research. The analysis of data from an empirical study of entrepreneurs in Norway gives at best partial support for the assumption. Contrary to what should be expected, the results indicate that strong ties are important channels for information and that weak ties give access to finance.     

Use of robust methods to determine quadratic surfaces: application to heritage

3D surveys of archaeological elements and the construction of virtual models enable us to reconstruct historical sites. They provide useful data to select specific building processes.Photogrammetry and Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) are the most common techniques to obtain synthetically heritage models. These techniques provide massive data which can only be managed by replacing them by primitive shapes, thereby obtaining more simple models and the explicit geometry of the element. Statistical and robust methods are used for this substitution, thereby avoiding the common errors due to measuring. Of these methods, the most widely used are the least-median-of-squares (LMedS) and the RANSAC method.Another computation method consists in recursive processes based on evolutive-type algorithms to adjust the model to the data captured.This paper describes two surface computation methodologies to determine the modelling of a column shaft located in temple G of the archaeological park of Selinunte (Sicily).