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2 pp. / discontinued 3/4/11 / Fluid intake tips for training and competition.

As social scientists have become increasingly aware of the welfare implications of firms' locations in space there has been a considerable amount of renewed interest in the issues pertaining to the geography of price. In the short time since Hay and Johnston (1980) lamented the insufficient attention being given to the theoretical background of geographic pricing, there has been impressive amounts of progress in certain analytical areas. However, within this bulk of literature, we still know remarkably little about the determinants of geographic price variation in spatial markets containing numerous sellers (firms) and buyers (consumers). Perhaps this should not be surprising given that much of the current research is being carried out by economists (who generally tend to emphasize market process in classically constructed structural-conduct-performance modes) rather than geographers (who tend to emphasize market description and locational patterns/properties arising from spatially defined economic and behavioral market processes). This dissertation focuses on geographic price variations in competitive oligopolies, where firms react under alternative pricing conjectures/strategies. Using computer aided simulation, the analytics of equilibrium price levels are examined in one-dimensional bounded and unbounded markets to uncover the algebraic properties of spatial markets, the effects of firm density, firm location, and demand elasticity on prices, the perversities associated with consumer-related transportation costs, and the distorting effects of mixed or asymmetrical rivals' pricing strategies. The modeling of spatial price competition is regarded as essential in the evaluation of equilibrium price as a function of boundary complications, market description, and the spatial arrangement of interdependent rivals. Long-run implications of spatial price competition are discussed with the intention of developing a model (beyond the scope of this dissertation) that not only recognizes rivals' price reactions, but also stresses locationally competitive strategies. Some empirical evidence on the nature of spatial price dependence amongst rival food chains in a metropolitan area is also examined.

The role of memory in repeated search tasks is contentious. Wolfe et al. (2000) have argued that participants do not learn a repeated scene and continue to perform a time-consuming search process for hundreds of trials. In contrast, Chun and Jiang (1998, 1999) have shown that search efficiency is improved for repeated versus new scenes and this learning can occur for either spatial layout independent of identity or identity independent of spatial layout. The experiments presented here demonstrate that participants learn a great deal about repeated search displays including the location of a particular item (both identity and location), the relative probability with which an item occurs in a location, and direction from the fixation point to the target. I argue that memory is established for these components and the reactivation of these memories by a repeated search display produces competition. This competitive target verification process takes time and can result in positive search slopes, which have been taken as evidence for memory-free search - a flawed logical argument.

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