Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

From Introduction: It is now nearly 50 years since the appearance of Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and the stream of articles and books on what Keynes really meant or didn't mean shows no sign of abating. In part, this dissertation is a contribution to this voluminous literature, but what follows is hardly an attempt to provide an exhaustive interpretation. Instead the General Theory is examined from a certain angle, with the title "Equilibrium, Expectations and Information" providing the framework for the investigation. That the title has been borrowed from G.B. Richdrdson's 1959 Economic Journal article is no accident. Richardson's work has been unduly neglected and his trichotomy serves as a convenient platform from which to analyse Keynes's method and those of his interpreters, in particular the approaches stemming from the work of Clower and Leijonhufvud. The information structure of the Walrasian type of general equilibrium model is also examined as the latter forms the basis of both the neo-classical interpretation of Keynes's contribution and the rational expectations approach that will be discussed. Finally Richardson's framework is applied in an analysis of two modern classical schools of thought, namely the rational expectations approach headed by Lucas, and the neoRicardian school amongst which Garegnani, Eatwell and Milgate, for example, are prominent. In a sentence, therefore, what follows is an examination of the General Theory and certain interpretations thereof as well as an analysis of modern classical macroeconomics, with the equilibrium-expectations-information framework providing the unifying theme. As will become apparent, the framework does not consist of three watertight compartments. For example, whether a system is in equilibrium or not will depend on whether the expectations of those who have the ablility to effect change are realised. The specification of which agents have this power will depend on the information with which the model builder endows the agents in the model. In discussing this, attention is drawn to Keynes's important distinction between an entrepreneur economy and a cooperative economy. The distinction between the information available to the model builder and that with which he endows the agents in the model is also emphasized.

This thesis considers the utilization of an exhaustible resource in an oligopolistic market in which producers are assumed to behave noncooperatively. Within a game-theoretic framework, the amount of resource recovered by the industry is endogenized by allowing producers to undertake, prior to extraction, investment activities which alter the variable cost of resource recovery. The open-loop Cournot-Nash equilibrium is characterized in considerable detail, especially in the symmetric case in which property rights are identical across producers. In this case, it is shown that an increase in the number of producers in the industry (a) increases the ultimate amount: of resource recovered by the industry (b) increases the initial investment undertaken on each deposit (c) lowers the resource price, at least initially (d) raises the shadow price of the resource, initially (e) decreases the present value of industry profits, and (f) increases the present value of the total surplus generated in the Cournot-Nash equilibrium. When the property rights are asymmetric, it is shown that the output profile of the industry is inefficient from society's point of view: the same stream of resource output can be provided, in general, at lower investment cost and present value variable cost. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Statistics, June 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz 2002. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-94).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 506-514).

Presale of residential units refers to putting the units on sale before they are completed. The value of presale to the developer comes from the flexibility of timing the presale launch so as to optimize the expected payoff. We model the developer's optimal launch timing as a real option, and the purchaser's series of presale payments with the flexibility to default as compound options. By assuming a stochastic property price process, we derive model frameworks that a risk-averse developer should adopt in launching the presale under single and multiple payment schemes. The frameworks solve the optimal conditions, contract structures, and prices for the launch. We then extend the model to optimize developers' payoffs in monopolistic and imperfect market equilibria. Finally, by assuming a jump-diffusion demand shock process and based on game theoretic approach, we derive sub-game Nash equilibrium optimal strategies that determine when and at what price developers should launch for presale with stochastic or deterministic rare market events. All the models thus derived are subject to probabilities of purchaser defaults, which will happen if the contract prices are too high when compared to market prices. Our model frameworks confirm that the launch option values increase with increases in price growth rates and variances, but decrease in risk-free rates. Furthermore, developers tend to delay the launch when good events are anticipated, while launching presale earlier at lower prices in times of expected bad events. The equilibrium strategies also provide an alternative explanation to oversupply in property markets. We further illustrate effects of rare events on presale launching strategies through government intervention (particularly public housing and housing subsidies) and output flow uncertainty in competitive equilibrium. Our general optimal strategic models are robust in a few aspects. First, we include the time factor that is crucial for some real options. Second, only slight adjustments are required to cope with market changes, or jumps. Finally, the strategies thus derived can be extensively and flexibly applied to other real options which incur multi-stage contingent payoffs, and whose price processes are characterized by stochastic jump-diffusion process. / Lai Neng. / "October 2000." / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-01, Section: A, page: 0270. / Supervisor: Ko Wang. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 184-192). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / School code: 1307.

Cheung, Man Wah. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-53). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Stochastic Stability --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Some Examples --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Our Main Focus --- p.5 / Chapter 1.4 --- Thesis Outline --- p.6 / Chapter 2 --- KMR's Approach and its Variations --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- KMR's Approach --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Variations --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Bergin and Lipman (1996) --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Anderlini and Ianni (1996) --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Robson and Vega-Redondo (1996) --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Robles (1998) and Pak (2008) --- p.13 / Chapter 3 --- Mathematical Reviews on Nonstationary Markov Chain --- p.15 / Chapter 3.1 --- Ergodic Coefficient --- p.15 / Chapter 3.2 --- Weak Ergodicity --- p.16 / Chapter 3.3 --- Strong Ergodicity --- p.18 / Chapter 4 --- Existing Works on Time-Dependent Mutation Rates --- p.20 / Chapter 4.1 --- Model and Definitions --- p.20 / Chapter 4.2 --- Sufficient Condition for Weak Ergodicity --- p.23 / Chapter 4.3 --- Sufficient Condition for Strong Ergodicity --- p.24 / Chapter 5 --- Time-Dependent Mutations and Empirical Distribution --- p.26 / Chapter 5.1 --- Model --- p.28 / Chapter 5.2 --- Convergence of Empirical Distribution --- p.30 / Chapter 5.3 --- Proofs of Claims --- p.35 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Proofs of Claims l(a)-(d) --- p.36 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Proof of Claim 2 --- p.39 / Chapter 6 --- Open Problems --- p.42 / Chapter 6.1 --- Numerical Example and Simulations --- p.43 / Chapter 6.2 --- Numerical Results --- p.44 / Chapter 6.3 --- Other Discussions --- p.47 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.48 / Bibliography --- p.50

Presently, the more or less global political consensus is that the primary task of government is to perpetually maximise a quantity called 'economic growth'. Given the decline of 'socialist' models of industrialisation, the economic consensus is that economic growth is best achieved through the deregulation of markets, industry and trade, as free markets are self-regulating institutions that automatically and efficiently optimise growth through their tendency to reach 'equilibrium.' Another word for this consensus might be 'neoliberalism'. This cosy situation, however, is increasingly under challenge from the recent transformation of global warming from a deniable proposition to a clear and present danger. As ecologists and earth scientists have long argued, global warming (an unforeseen side effect of what was called the 'energy crisis' in the 1970s) is just one of many aspects of a generalised global ecological crisis. The biosphere, environmentalists tell us, is radically 'out of balance'. Given this impasse, it appears that the science of social systems (economics) and the science of living systems (ecology) are incommensurable. This incommensurability is the starting point of the thesis, which seeks to provide a genealogy of the concepts of equilibrium and growth as they appear in the claims of both disciplines to represent 'hard' science. Drawing from debates in the philosophy of science, studies in the history of ideas, the anthropology of technology, and political economy, the thesis charts the mutual exchange of metaphors and analogies between the natural and the social sciences, and traces a surprisingly parallel trajectory in the separate histories of economics and ecology. Beginning with early historicist and organicist conceptual frameworks, both sciences embraced 'mechanism' in their bid to attain the mantle of Science. For both sciences, the attainment of this status was associated with the incorporation of the language of energetics and an insistent identification of 'equilibrium' with the central scientific object of inquiry, 'the market' and 'the ecosystem' respectively. What is ironic in these claims is that the acceptance of the machine metaphor effecti vely screened out the study of actual machinery from the pure states of nature called 'the market' or 'the economy.' This history is taken up to the climactic moment of the early 1970s, when, it is argued, the ontological foundations of ecology and economics collided. This is the moment from which the political discourses of neoliberal globalisation and global environmental crisis both date, and since then we see the rise of hybrid discourses that attempt to address and overcome the deep contradictions of disciplinary specialisation. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of this conceptual legacy, and in analysing the interactions of the 'new ecology' and the 'new economy', offers suggestions as to why what appeared in 1971 as a fundamental and obvious contradiction between 'growth' and 'equilibrium', no longer attracts debate.