SPATIAL PRICING IN INTERDEPENDENT MARHETS*

ABSTRACT. Conditions for spatial price equilibrium are derived for a set of firms in oligopolistic spatial competition, distributed at fixed locations in a heterogeneous region where consumer purchasing patterns are a probabilistic function of the price distribution rather than a deterministic function of proximity to firms. The resulting prices vary with accessibility to consumers or with the degree of local spatial monopoly, and result in non-zero profits for firms. Conditions describing the existence and stability properties of this spatial price equilibrium are defined, and are shown to be equivalent for two different hypotheses concerning disequilibrium pricing behavior: a partial price adjustment model and a Bertrand game. For two different profit goals, total profit maximization and profit rate maximization, it is shown that a spatial price equilibrium exists and is at least locally quasi-stable.     

"Testimonies from the Field": The Coming of Christian Science to Australia, c. 1890–1910*

The account of the coming of Christian Science to Australia given in this article is based on testimony contributed by early adherents to the two main church publications, The Christian Science Journal and the Christian Science Sentinel , supplemented by Church records and other sources. The first two decades are covered, from the earliest known intimations of interest to the death of Mary Baker Eddy in 1910, when a Christian Science presence in Australia was assured. Interest shown by writer Miles Franklin, and her association with Melbourne adherents such as leading feminist Vida Goldstein, provides the starting point. The focus is on positive responses. It is postulated that in addition to the documentary and expressive value of the testimonies, they point to problems of class and health in turn-of-the-century Australia. A preponderance of women in both the testimonies and the practice is evidenced, and the openness of progressive women to new approaches is noted. With reference to male testimony, it is suggested that further research into responses to American ways in religion by the urban midle class would be very valuable.     

Profit-Rate Maximization in Interdependent Markets: A Research Note

In the theory of the firm it is conventional to regard firms as (total)profit-maximizing institutions. In this paper it is shown that the interdependence among firms that is characteristic of monopolistic competition makes it plausible for them also to choose to maximize the rate of profit on capital advanced. For a homogeneous product with inelastic total demand, such as gasoline retailing, firms acting as rational agents, facing fixed costs in a homogeneous spatial market, and choosing to set prices under rate of profit-maximization can achieve higher total profits than firms operating under total profit-maximizing objectives.     

The Family Behind the Farm: Race and the Affective Geographies of Manitoba Pork Production

As increasing toxicity of Manitoba lakes garners public concern, the environmental impacts of pork producers have come under scrutiny. In this context, the Manitoba Pork Council launched The Family Behind the Farm, a series of advertisements and testimonials featuring pork producers and their families. We examine how this campaign operates affectively to distance the family farm from industrial pork production. Building upon geographical literature theorizing the relationship between race and affect, we argue that the campaign mobilizes pride in the family farm through heteronormative and racialized affects of intimacy, tradition, and intergenerational continuity. In the process, not only is pork production made innocent, but the family farm, and rural Manitoba itself, is reproduced as a white, heteronormative space with an innocent past and secure future. By analyzing this specific case, the paper demonstrates the role of the heteronormative family in reproducing affective geographies of whiteness.     

Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers,USA, 1800–1930

When middle–class women began to wear drawers in the early 1800s, they were feminised by fabric, ornamentation and an open crotch. Incorporating open drawers into respectable women’s dress within a framework of ‘passionlessness’ constructed female sexuality as both erotic and modest. Crotch construction figured in the twentieth–century struggle to establish modern boundaries of women’s sexual propriety. The accepted sexual and moral meanings generated by open– and closed–crotch undergarments reversed as women increasingly chose to wear closed drawers during a period of women’s greater public presence and feminist activism. The transition from open to closed drawers reveals not only the power of clothing as a medium of significance, but how women’s struggles for autonomy interact with resistant social forces to reconfigure gender distinctions.