The purpose of this research was to utilise a unique researcher vantage point (as embedded academy coach) to explore the experiences of male youth footballers (14-15 years old) at an English professional football academy. Participant observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve boys were used to generate data. The analysis focused upon (a) the competitive social organisation of the academy, (b) representations of masculinity (c) emotional proximity and what it means to be ‘friends’ in the academy setting, and (d) attitudes towards homosexuality. My findings highlight the limited ability of boys to develop trust and ‘deep’ friendships in this institutional context. These findings suggest that a hyper-competitive (neoliberal) market-driven rationality penetrates football academies and may play a role in altering the parameters of how ‘friendships’ can be lived and experienced for young people ‘on the inside’ of such institutions. Despite limitations on ‘friendships’ and emotional-proximity inside the academy, there was some evidence of inclusivity (c.f. Anderson, 2009), with regards to attitudes towards homosexuality. However, drawing on the concepts of complicity (Connell, 1987, 1995) and hybridity (c.f. Demetriou, 2001; Bridges, 2014), caution is maintained in describing these youth academy footballers as conclusively inclusive. Implications of these findings, limitations of this study and directions for future research are all discussed.

Sessile communities provide an ideal opportunity to understand how population interactions are structured in space, and in turn, how this structure influences population dynamics. The yellow tube sponge, Aplysina fistularis is common on Caribbean coral reefs and is involved in four main types of ecological interactions: symbiosis, predation, disease, and competition. We used spatial and multivariate analysis to describe the population structure of A. fistularis on the Belizean barrier reef, and consequently, how the observed spatial structure influenced sponge morphology and the frequency of population interactions. We found that sponges were non-randomly distributed across the reef, with both local density and tendency towards a clustered spatial distribution increasing with depth. Sponge morphology also varied with depth; deeper sponges were larger and had fewer tubes then their shallower conspecifics. Local density and spatial autocorrelational patterns were not significant predictors of population interactions. The frequency of symbiosis, characterized by the presence of the fish Elacatinus lori, increased with depth, sponge size, and number of sponge tubes. The incidence of predation increased with depth, number of tubes, and the interaction between these two variables. The chance of disease decreased with increasing sponge size. Lastly, the frequency of spatial competition decreased with depth. These results highlight the unexpected finding that in this system, symbiosis, predation, disease, and competition, are density independent, specifically they are not predicted by local density or spatial autocorrelational patterns. Overall, this study provides an essential framework that will greatly enhance our knowledge of sponge ecology on coral reefs.

This dissertation explores how the tea-growing districts of China and colonial India were integrated into the global division of labor over a formative century of boom-bust expansion. I explore this history of competition by highlighting two dimensions of economic and intellectual change: the intensification of agrarian labor and the synchronous emergence of new paradigms of economic thought. As tea exports from China and India soared and competition grew fiercer, planters, factory overseers, peasants, and government officials shifted their attention from the wealth-creating possibilities of commerce to the value-creating potential of labor and industrial production. This study also historically situates two older, teleological assumptions in the field of Asian economic history: the inevitability of industrialization and of proletarianization. Both assumptions emerged from social and economic transformations during the nineteenth century. In particular, periodic market crises compelled Chinese and colonial Indian officials to seriously question older "Smithian" theories premised upon the "sphere of circulation." Instead, both regional industries pursued interventionist measures focused on the "abode of production." In India, officials passed special laws for indentured labor recruitment. In China, reformers organized tea peasants and workers into agrarian cooperatives. Finally, colonial officials and Bengali reformers in India agreed that they needed to liberate the unfree "coolie" from the shackles of unfree labor. And in China, reformers articulated a critique of rentier "comprador" merchants and moneylenders who exploited peasant labor. Thus, although the "coolie" and "comprador" became twentieth-century symbols of Asian economic backwardness, they were each, as concepts, produced by profound social and economic changes that were dynamic, eventful, and global in nature.

The three chapters of my dissertation study imperfect competition, multiproduct firms, and consumer demand. Chapter 1 estimates a structural model of consumer demand and oligopolistic retail competition in order to study three mechanisms through which retailers affect allocative efficiency and consumer welfare. First, variable markups across retail stores within a location induce a misallocation of resources. The deadweight loss from this retail misallocation can be large since a significant fraction of household consumption comes from retail goods. Second, across locations, retail markups may vary with market size. This regional variation plays an important role in recent economic geography models as an agglomeration force. In the limit, models predict that the distortion from variable markups disappears in large markets, although it is an open question, How Large is Large? Third, since retail stores are differentiated, differences in the variety of retail stores available to consumers matters for consumer welfare across locations. To quantify the importance of these mechanisms, I estimate my model using retail scanner data with prices and sales at the barcode level from thousands of stores across the US. I find that the deadweight loss and consumption misallocation from variable retail markups are economically significant. I estimate that retail markups are smaller in larger cities, and that markets the size of New York City and Los Angeles are approximately at the undistorted monopolistically competitive limit. My results show that retail store variety significantly impacts the cost of living and could be an important consumption-based agglomeration force. The second chapter of my dissertation develops and structurally estimates a model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms that can be used to decompose the firm-size distribution into the contributions of costs, quality, markups, and product scope. In this joint work with Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein, we find that variation in firm quality and product scope explains at least four fifths of the variation in firm sales using Nielsen barcode data on prices and sales. We show that the imperfect substitutability of products within firms, and the fact that larger firms supply more products than smaller firms, implies that standard productivity measures are not independent of demand system assumptions and probably dramatically understate the relative productivity of the largest firms. Although most firms are well approximated by the monopolistic competition benchmark of constant markups, we find that the largest firms that account for most of aggregate sales depart substantially from this benchmark, and exhibit both variable markups and substantial cannibalization effects. The final chapter of my dissertation develops a new integrable demand system, called the Doubly-Translated CDES demand system, which is well suited to theoretical and empirical work. Commonly used analytically and computationally tractable demand systems severely restrict key properties of demand, which parametrically pins down the answers to many important economic questions. The Doubly-Translated CDES demand system is flexible in important ways that common demand systems are not, while maintaining effective global regularity and global consistency. Using data, I provide examples of this demand system's flexibility by calibrating different parameter values. I discuss how this demand system can be estimated with regularity imposed and correcting for the endogeneity of prices using constrained Nonlinear GMM.

The current Internet is a hierarchical architecture comprising heterogeneous entities of privately owned infrastructures, where higher tier Internet service providers (ISPs) supply connectivity to the lower tier ISPs and charge them for the transit service. One of the most challenging problems service providers facing today is how to increase the profitability while maintaining good service qualities as the network scales up. For the higher tier ISPs, the main concern is how to increase the profit by attracting more lower tier ISPs (or traffic), while the lower tier ISPs concern about the connectivity, quality of service as well as the cost of the transit service. In this thesis, we seek to understand the interaction between different hierarchies of ISPs. Note that the lower tier ISPs can transmit traffic to each other, either by purchasing the service from higher tier ISPs, or by setting "private peering links" between themselves. Higher tier ISPs, on the other hand, cannot charge the transit service at will since there is competition among higher tier ISPs. We model the interaction of these ISPs via a game theoretic approach. Under this competitive framework, we study the issues of (a) impact of private peering relationship among the lower tier ISPs, (b) resource allocation of the higher tier ISPs so that resource monopoly can be avoided, (c) under a competitive market, how can the higher tier ISPs perform revenue maximization, and (d) conditions wherein higher tier ISPs are willing to perform network upgrade when we scale up the network size. We divide the above investigation into single higher tier ISP and multiple higher tier ISPs scenarios. In each scenario, firstly, a generalized model is presented to characterize the behaviors of the lower tier and higher tier ISPs, in which their economic interests are reflected. We study how a lower tier ISP can distributively determine its optimal routing strategy. Furthermore, we show how a higher tier ISP is able to utilize the available information to infer its optimal pricing strategy, under which a revenue maximization is achieved. Two distributed algorithms are proposed to help them to provide a fair and efficient bandwidth allocation to lower tier ISPs. Last but not least, we investigate the above issues in a many-ISPs-regime, i.e. we scale up the network size. Our mathematical framework provides insights on the interaction among ISPs and show these ISPs can still gain profits as they upgrade the network infrastructures. Extensive simulations are carried out to quantify and support our theoretical claims. / Lee Cheuk Man. / "February 2008." / Adviser: John C. S. Lui. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: B, page: 4849. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-109). / 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 Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Keywords. Competitive strategy, Supply chain strategy, Leanness, Agility, Environmental uncertainty, Moderator, Cumulative model. / Supply chain management has become one of the most popular approaches to enhance the global competitiveness of business corporations today. Thus, it has received more and more attention from practitioners and the academia. However, how to effectively manage the flow of materials from supply sources to the ultimate customer represents a major challenge for today's managers. From the viewpoint of business competition, Porter (1980) identified three general types of strategies, i.e., overall cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. This research tries to make an extension of this typology from an angle of supply chain management. Two general supply chain strategies including leanness and agility are identified in this study. / This research is composed of three studies. Study 1 makes a contribution to investigate the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty on the relationship between competitive strategy and supply chain strategy, and between supply chain strategy and financial performance. The findings prove that environmental uncertainty works as a homologizer in the proposed framework. Using multiple group structural equation analysis, the different strengths of the impact of competitive strategy on supply chain strategy and that of supply chain strategy on financial performance are identified. Study 2 tests the validity of the matrix proposed by Fisher (1997) and Christopher (2000) in which the relationship between product characteristics and supply chain structure is proposed. The findings show that the functional product needs a higher level of the use of the lean supply chain, while innovative products need a higher level of the use of the agile or leagile supply chain. The regression results demonstrate that the match between product characteristics and supply chain strategy indeed lead to higher performance. Finally, study 3 identifies several supply chain management practices through a thorough literature review of about 300 academic papers and classifies them into eight bundles. Based on Ferdows and De Meyer (1990)'s cumulative model, we propose that lean manufacturers should focus on such practices that help them build lean capabilities, and agile manufacturers need to build lean capabilities first before pursuing agility. / Qi Yinan. / "May 2006." / Adviser: Xiande Zhao. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0644. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-187). / 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 Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

This thesis examines the role of endogenous size processes in the stability and price setting decisions of cartels. Chapter One analyses how the stability of cartels de- pends on the level of horizontal product differentiation and on costs of collusion under the premise that a cartel can consist of less than all firms in an industry. It is shown that when the size of the cartel is determined endogenously, it is possible that increased costs of collusion make a cartel more stable. Chapter Two analyses how the price setting of firms in collusive industries is affected by three different penalty regimes: i) profits, ii) overcharge, and iii) revenue based penalties. It is found that penalties influence price setting in two ways: directly, by affecting the industry price for a given cartel size and indirectly by affecting cartel size and thereby the price charged. When the penalties are equally tough, in the sense that they deter cartels over the same group of products, over- charge based penalties always lead to the lowest prices, followed by prices computed under profits based penalties and then revenue based penalties. For very few combinations of product differentiation and market size, revenue based penalties lead to lower prices than profits based penalties. Finally, Chapter Three presents a model in which collusive stability is analysed in a dynamic setting of free entry, exit and mergers. Contrary to the previous literature it shows that stable and profitable collusion is possible under free entry, without the need for cartels to play entry deterring strategies. Furthermore, the empirical evidence that a breakdown of collusion can lead to increased merger activity is replicated. An additional contribution of this model is that it defines a new notion of a long run sustainable competitive market size under merger and entry.

Ongoing global change has made understanding the factors that affect adaptation and survival of populations in the context of changing environments a central problem in evolutionary biology. Special focus has been given to the probability of survival through genetic adaptation to lethal environments; a process termed evolutionary rescue. Many studies of this process, both theoretical and empirical, have been carried out over the last two decades. As a result, we now understand how a number of factors may affect the probability of population survival. However, two factors that are known to affect evolutionary responses, mode of reproduction and interspecific interaction, have received limited attention. The main aim of my work was to investigate whether and how mode of reproduction and negative interspecies interactions (competition) affect the probability of evolutionary rescue. To achieve this goal, I set up a series of selection experiments, by propagating populations of unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in various stressful conditions, and monitored their survival and fitness. To investigate the effect of sex in these experiments, I manipulated mode of reproduction, by constructing the experimental populations allowed to reproduce either only sexually or asexually or both. To investigate the effect of competition, I manipulated the presence of the competitor(s) in the experimental populations, by cultivating them either in presence or absence of the competitor. I first tested the effect of rate of environmental deterioration and mode of reproduction on extinction dynamics and evolutionary rescue of the experimental populations. I found positive correlation between the rate of extinctions and the rate of environmental deterioration. The experiment revealed an interaction between mode of reproduction and the rate of deterioration, manifested through significantly reduced extinction rate of sexual populations relative to asexual populations in environment deteriorating at intermediate rate. I then investigated the effect of sex and competition on the probability of evolutionary rescue, by propagating the experimental populations in environment deteriorating in a simple way (the change comprising a single abiotic factor) and complex way (the change of both abiotic and biotic factors). I found the negative effect of competition on the probability of evolutionary rescue, and beneficial effect of sex in both types of environmental deterioration, reflected in higher number of rescued populations relative to asexual group. I then tested whether phylogenetic relatedness between a competitor and the focal species and the extent of their ecological similarity affect the likelihood of evolutionary rescue, by subjecting the experimental populations to the presence of 10 different competitors, isolated from two different types of habitats, and each being positioned on a different branch of the phylogenetic tree of Chlamydomonas genus. The probability of evolutionary rescue was contingent on the identity of a competitor species, but the results showed no significant effects of phylogenetic relatedness and ecological similarity. Finally, I investigated which experimental factors could potentially select for the long-term maintenance of sex, by subjecting the experimental populations to different types of selective environments (directional and fluctuating change of abiotic factors, the presence of the competitor) and monitoring the frequency of sex over the course of time. No selective environment significantly increased the rate of sex in the experimental populations. In contrast, I found reduction in frequency of sex in the populations subjected to fluctuating environmental change. My results demonstrate that both mode of reproduction and competition affect the probability of evolutionary rescue, which is generally positively affected by sex and negatively affected by competition. However, these general effects may be altered by other factors, namely mode of environmental change and the identity of the competitor species.

The aim of this paper which is called "Competition in Regulation: Implementation of BASEL II in Canada" is to analyze the introduction of Basel Rules in the banking sector in Canada. The goal is to prove that the economical stability, high concentration of the banking sector and a simple system of regulation and supervision can be a competitive advantage for a banking market. The analysis is based on the comparison of the implementation of BASEL II in Canada, the USA and the European Union.

Post-copulatory sexual selection is a strong evolutionary force, affecting morphological and behavioural traits in males and females in species with polyandrous mating systems. Many insects are subject to sperm competition; sperm from rival males compete to fertilise ova. Since sperm are finite, males should allocate them economically, tailoring ejaculate allocation to suit the reproductive potential of individual matings. Theory suggests when sperm competition risk is high, males should increase sperm numbers to achieve greater reproductive success than their rivals, but evidence of this expected fitness consequence of ejaculate allocation is largely lacking. In this thesis, I use Callosobruchus maculatus beetles to investigate the causes of ejaculate allocation patterns, and to examine whether ejaculate allocation does affect male reproductive success. In Chapter 3, I investigate the effect of rival male presence on ejaculate size and find that, while males grouped with rivals as adults produce bigger ejaculates, their increased effort unexpectedly does not lead to increased reproductive success. In Chapter 4, I examine whether larval conditions also affect ejaculate size, and find that, contrary to sperm competition theory, males reared under dense conditions produce smaller ejaculates than those reared solitarily, and that male reproductive success is consequently elevated in males reared at low larval densities compared to those reared at high densities. In Chapter 5, I then demonstrate that ejaculates produced by low density males contain more sperm than ejaculates produced by high density males, suggesting males do not respond to sperm competition level represented by larval density, but instead suffer resource limitation when reared at high density. In Chapter 6, I investigate the effects of water provision on ejaculate size, and find that males given water produce larger ejaculates, and females given water receive smaller ejaculates. Finally, I link my findings with those of other studies, and suggest my most important result is that plasticity of ejaculate allocation cannot be assumed to be an adaptive behaviour; studies directly measuring the fitness effects of male ejaculate allocation are needed, even when observed patterns conform to theory.