MARKET DEFINITION AND ASSESSING THE COMPETITIVE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RAIL AND TRUCK TRANSPORTATION*

ABSTRACT. In this paper we develop a method for establishing market definition in studies of intermodal competition. We employ the proposed method in a transportation model that yields estimates of the substitutability between truck and rail services for the transport of fresh fruits and vegetables. The model includes the produce being shipped as an input into the production of delivered produce. Our results demonstrate that fairly disaggregate market definitions are required to characterize adequately the intermodal substitution possibilities of interest. While disaggregate data are required for econometric estimation of the cost function, it is essential that elasticities be calculated at a disaggregate level as well. The elasticities reported are larger than reported in earlier work and provide strong evidence of vigorous intermodal competition in produce transportation markets.     

Pandora and Hatshepsut: Ancient Archtypes in the iconography of kingship

Greek myths contain iconographic material relating to the legitimacy, power and succession problems of early kingship. They may even represent the relics of kingly liturgies recited at coronations and New Year festivals. This essay analyses Hesiod's Pandora, her presentation and regalia, as an icon of queenly power reflecting the important power of women in the Egyptian royal cult and the great exponent of that role, Queen Hatshepsut. Pandora's veil, crown, name and ‘box’ or ‘jar’ recall both the moment of apotheosis of Egyptian queens and the emblems of the Egyptian royal priestesses who tended the divinity of kings. They also recall the astral and solar imagery of the great goddesses of Mesopotamia, Anath, Ishtar and Astarte—as well as Hesiod's Europa—queenly figures of great power.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.