Abstract This paper shows that collusive behavior of firms in production with lump-sum payment licensing may occur in an infinitely repeated duopoly if both firms adopt a two-period strategy to interact with each other. It is profitable for the patent-holding firm with non-drastic cost-reducing innovation to use licensing as a strategic means to induce the opponent to cooperate in pursuit of joint profit. It is proved that there exists a Pareto dominant two-period strategy profile, which is an equilibrium in both equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium paths. Furthermore, it is shown that the duration of punishment while two firms are in the out-of-equilibrium is endogenously determined.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Annie Clement, Florida State University, College of Education, Dept. of Sport Management, Recreation Management, and Physical Education. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 2, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

The current air traffic concept of operations relies on a centralized process in which ground controllers are responsible for determining conflict-free trajectories. However, with new technologies such as ADS-B and GPS, aircraft could directly interact together to resolve their own conflicts in a decentralized manner. The challenge is to guarantee aircraft separation while converging to reasonably fair resolutions for all aircraft. The difficulty is that aircraft have only limited information about how the other aircraft evaluate the cost of conflict resolutions. Thus, this thesis proposes to frame decentralized conflict resolution using game theory. A collaborative decentralized conflict resolution is developed as a sequential bargaining process between the different aircraft. The goal of each aircraft is to minimize the cost associated with the conflict resolution. However, each aircraft doesn’t know the cost function and performance constraints of the other involved aircraft. In the sequential bargaining process developed, aircraft propose at each step personal trajectories to the other aircraft, corresponding to trajectories they would be ready to fly. Then they compute response trajectories, corresponding to trajectories they would have to fly to avoid the conflict if the personal trajectories were flown. If some response trajectories are cheaper than the offered personal trajectories, an agreement is reached; otherwise compromises have to be made by the aircraft by offering more expensive personal trajectories at the next step. Several pairwise conflict experiments, corresponding to different conflict geometries, were conducted to explore different ways of handling performance constraints and different ways of searching trajectories in the resolution space. Ultimately, the algorithm was demonstrated in a large scale simulation with more than a thousand aircraft flying over the Indianapolis Center, incurring more than five hundred conflicts. The traffic sets were taken from real ETMS data over five hours, to represent ‘real’ conditions. 93% of the conflicts were successfully solved by the bargaining process.

Recent explorations of hierarchy in international relations have restricted their domain of inquiry to states as aggregate units. Although this has greatly enhanced our understanding of international politics, we know less about what the implications of hierarchy are for domestic politics in subordinate states. Because of the varieties of domestic political control - including violence - employed by great powers, opening up the black box of subordinate state politics can yield new insights into the operations and limits of international hierarchy. Here I outline a theory of political incentivization and link it to a discussion of foreign-imposed regime change, arguing that great powers stabilize politics in subordinate states directly by bolstering preferred regimes and indirectly by threatening to intervene and remove leaders who challenge the status quo. / text

This dissertation contains three essays analyzing how families form and how family members interact. The first chapter studies and connects recent trends in age at marriage and divorce. The second chapter looks within marriages to analyze household bargaining. The final chapter examines the effects on cohort characteristics of the changes in fertility induced by the legalization of abortion. In my first essay, I explore the extent to which the rise in age at marriage can explain the rapid decrease in divorce rates for cohorts marrying from 1980 to 2004. Three different empirical approaches all demonstrate that an increase in women’s age at marriage can explain at least 60 percent of the decline in the hazard of divorce since 1980. I further develop and simulate an integrated model of the marriage market to demonstrate that monotone decreases in gains to marriage could lead to both the initial rise in divorce and its subsequent fall. My second essays analyzes the impact of the early 1990s state waivers from welfare guidelines to understand how changes in options outside of marriage affect household expenditures. Welfare waivers decreased the public assistance available to impoverished divorced women and thereby reduced a woman’s bargaining threat point in marriage. Using expenditure data and an empirical synthetic control approach, I find that decreases in potential welfare benefits altered the expenditure patterns of two-parent families containing less-educated or stay-at-home mothers. The changes in expenditure patterns suggest that reductions in a wife’s outside options cause her utility within marriage to decline. My third essay examines how cohorts whose mothers had legal and safe access to abortion differ from those whose mothers did not. Using both birth certificate and wage data, I demonstrate that granting women access to abortion led to changes in child characteristics, even among groups of children born within months or weeks of each other. Analysis further suggests that soon after legalization, women used abortion to better-time their births. Moreover, access to abortion increased the eventual wages of low-wage, black, and Hispanic workers but not the wages of whites or high-wage workers. / Economics

No description available.

No description available.

Contractarianism with a Human Face reinterprets the social contract, not as a model to generate a unique set of rules of justice, but as a dynamic process for making comparative institutional evaluations. An institutional reorientation allows contractarians to abandon the untenable assumption of a homogeneous model of agency (be it austere rational choice or Rawlsian reasonableness), replacing it with diverse agents living under institutions all can rationally endorse, and to which they have different reasons to comply. Contractarianism With a Human Face is a contractarian theory that differs from all other contractarian theories because it rejects the search for a unique answer to the question of what is justice. It does not flee from diversity, but instead finds new solutions to old problems through broadening the contractual model and the agents that make it up. This version of contractarianism has a human face in the sense that it starts from the diversity, disorder, and complexity of human life and seeks to find rules that we can all live under. Not by eliminating that diversity, but by embracing it. In so doing, however, it fundamentally changes the shape of contractarian theory. By rejecting the search for a unique "solution" to what rules of justice are justified, Contractarianism With a Human Face becomes a project of evaluating contingent and evolving institutions and constitutional rules. Rationality and justice are reconciled, at least partially, though human history.

Šiame magistriniame darbe nagrinėjama kolektyvinių derybų bei kolektyvinių sutarčių sudarytų aukštesniu nei įmonės lygiu ypatumai. Tiriant kolektyvinių derybų požymius Europos Bendrijos bei nacionaliniu lygiais, siekiama atskleisti aukštesnio lygio kolektyvinių derybų reikšmę kuriant darbo teisinius santykius. Apibendrinant pagrindinius kolektyvinių derybų požymius, išskiriami aukštesnio lygio kolektyvinių derybų ypatumai. Remiantis socialinės partnerystės samprata bei šiam institutui būdingais principais, darbe didžiausias dėmesys skiriamas kolektyvinėms deryboms dėl nacionalinių, šakos ir teritorinių kolektyvinių sutarčių sudarymo. Nagrinėjant kolektyvinės sutarties sampratą ir turinį, siekiama atskleisti aukštesnio lygio kolektyvinių sutarčių, kaip sėkmingo kolektyvinių derybų rezultato specifiką. Aukštesnio lygio kolektyvinės sutartys analizuojamos remiantis bendrais visoms kolektyvinėms sutartims būdingais požymiais, akcentuojant tarptautiniuose ir nacionaliniuose teisės aktuose įtvirtintus tik šio lygio kolektyvinėms sutartims būdingus ypatumus. Remiantis šiuo metu kolektyvinius santykius įtvirtinančiais šaltiniais, atkreipiamas dėmesys į aukštesnio lygio kolektyvinių sutarčių reglamentavimo kaitą Lietuvoje. Atsižvelgiant į kolektyvinių santykių svarbą šiuolaikiniame visuomeniniame ir ekonominiame gyvenime, tiriami aukštesnio lygio kolektyvinių derybų dėl kolektyvinių sutarčių sudarymo teoriniai ir praktiniai aspektai Lietuvos darbo teisėje. Siekiama atksleisti, kaip... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / This master thesis examines the peculiarities of the collective bargaining and the collective bargaining agreements above enterprise level. While going into the attributes of collective bargaining at the European Union and national levels, it is aimed at revealing the significance of higher-level collective bargaining when building labor legal relationships. When summarizing the main attributes of collective bargaining, peculiarities of higher-level collective bargaining are singled out. Based on the conception of social partnership and principles inherent to this institute, this work focuses on collective bargaining regarding conclusion of national, branch and territorial collective agreements. When exploring the conception and content of collective agreements, it aimed at disclosing the specifics of higher-level collective agreements as a corollary of successful collective bargaining. Higher-level collective agreements are being analyzed based on the features common to all collective agreements, while emphasizing the peculiarities inherent to collective agreements of this level only that are entrenched in international and national legislative acts. Based on the sources currently establishing collective relationships, attention is drawn to the changes of regulation of collective agreements in Lithuania. Considering the significance of collective relationships in contemporary social and economic life, theoretical and practical aspects of higher-level collective negotiations... [to full text]

New Zealand presently operates a "free market" system of employment and labour relations in which there are no prescribed or mandatory bargaining procedures. When this system was introduced by the Employment Contracts Act 1991 (the "ECA" ) it represented a dramatic departure from the previous system of state regulated collective bargaining, conciliation and arbitration: a system that had existed in New Zealand for almost a century. Although this change in approach was supported by free market advocates, it also generated considerable international and domestic criticism. In response to that criticism, a number of New Zealand politicians stated in 1996 that they would consider imposing on employers and employees a statutory duty to bargain in good faith. However, since the end of 1996, very little has occurred in respect of this issue. Indeed, it now appears that the current New Zealand Government may have abandoned this proposal altogether. If this is, in fact, the Government's decision, it ought to be viewed with concern, for it has been made without the benefit of informed debate. Little, if any, substantive consideration has been given to whether such a duty ought to be introduced, and if so, the form it might take and impact it might have. If an informed decision is to be made to enact a duty of this nature, or not, as the case may be, its merits must be the subject of further debate. This thesis will endeavour to contribute to that debate by examining how one approach to the duty to bargain in good faith, that which applies in British Columbia, Canada, might operate in New Zealand. This examination will consist of six chapters. The first will contextualise the New Zealand arguments on whether a duty of this nature ought to be introduced into the ECA. Chapter two will then examine the duty to bargain in good faith as it applies in British Columbia industrial relations. Chapter three will take that duty, and examine the extent to which it is currently replicated in New Zealand. It will be concluded that little of the substance of this duty is to be found in the law which presently governs the New Zealand labour market. Chapter four will assess the costs of introducing a duty of this nature into the ECA, particularly in terms of reduced efficiency and freedom. Chapter five will identify a number of specific issues that will require resolution if the duty is to operate effectively in New Zealand, and the terms of a suggested statutory amendment will be proffered. It will be concluded in chapter six that introducing a duty to bargain in good faith, akin to that which applies in British Columbia, would benefit New Zealand employers, employees and society as a whole. Further, it will be argued that such a duty must be introduced if labour bargaining in New Zealand is to occur in any meaningful way for most employees. And finally, it will be suggested that if this duty is to be introduced effectively, legislative amendment will be required. For these reasons, it will be asserted that the New Zealand Government ought to revisit the issue of introducing into the ECA a statutory duty to bargain in good faith.