how to best ensure remuneration for creators in the market for music copyright and its alternatives the focus of this essay is to examine the market for copyrighted works with a particular emphasis on the sound recording market this market is currently in a state of flux some would say disarray due to the ability of the internet to lower transmission costs for both authorized and unauthorized copies with the latter being at this time far more prevalent in this essay we discuss the intent of copyright the role of copying and file sharing and some alternative production consumption schemes meant to strengthen or to replace copyright

beyond the hype intellectual property and the knowledge society knowledge economy this paper explores the debates surrounding whether or not we have now moved into a new knowledge economy andsor knowledge society and if so whether this shift is as significant and as far reaching as the industrial revolution in this possible transformation the place of information communications technologies has been crucial debate has occurred across both economics and sociology with differing emphases as is shown in the ranges of definitions that we review in the paper one consistent factor is the lack of clarity and consistency between them both within and across the disciplines in order to explore the issues that the debates raises in a more grounded way the paper explores them in relation to intellectual property ip and the intellectual commons in the process of innovation growth and economic development the paper is developed through an analysis first of the industrial revolution and the role within this of uncertainty technologies complementarities and elective affinities and the way ip was protected and controlled through patents secrecy being first to the market and copyright the second part of the paper examines definitions of the knowledge economy and society and the role within these of information communication technologies in order to explore whether the ways that ip is protected and controlled have changed in the debate about the knowledge economy and society the role of innovation via human capital with a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities has been emphasized the role of ip thus remains central but is now challenged by the rise of new forms of communication which make its protection harder and move much of the concern with respect to regulation to a global rather than national and local level copyright 2006 the authors journal compilation 2006 blackwell publishing ltd

introduction and overview to the special issue on biodiversity conservation access and benefit sharing and traditional knowledge the concept of access and benefit sharing abs in genetic resources as maintained by the convention on biological diversity cbd aims at promoting the conservation of biodiversity and equity between the north and the south at the same time its implementation challenges various disciplines first from an economic point of view designing efficient abs provisions turns to be highly complex given its multi task and multi agent problem structure and given the lack of evidence that the economic benefits drawn from the exploitation of genetic resources will suffice to fund the preservation of biodiversity second from a legal point of view the principles of the cbd are very general their proper implementation requires the design of new intellectual property rights and new liability regimes which challenge the current legal doctrines and have complex interactions with pre existing legal regimes third from the perspective of political and management sciences the implementation of the cbd raises the question of how to design institutional frameworks that enable both democratic decision making taking into account the interests of the diverse stakeholders at the global level and collective learning considering the fact that humanity is dealing with complex problems characterized by numerous dimensions and high uncertainties this special issue assembles a set of papers dealing with these issues and questions c 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the politics of flatland a version of the median voter theorem holds for two dimensional spatial models in which voters regard the two dimensions as economic goods or goodlike activities and in which the set of feasible outcomes is constrained by budget or technology although mathematically trivial this fact has widespread analytical uses after arguing that our two dimensional model with its stability property fits a number of important and general policy areas we use our analysis to address some prominent theoretical issues

the supermajority core of the us senate and the failure to join the league of nations the failure of the united states to join the league of nations is often considered to be an outcome of isolationist influence the supermajority requirement of treaty ratification in the us senate also is blamed for allowing a minority of isolationists to block the will of the majority that supported the treaty to determine the cause of the failure i analyze the senate debate over the treaty using the concepts of the supermajority core and supermajority winset using all 157 votes on the treaty i estimate senatorial positions and the locations of both the status quo and the treaty on the same metric space from this analysis i find that isolationists were not influential enough to block the ratification instead president wilson s unwillingness to compromise is found to have played a critical role in the treaty s defeat the treaty s defeat thus was not an indication of the power of isolationism this study contributes to the growing body of literature that debunks claims about the dominance of isolationism in the interwar period at the same time the paper demonstrates how the core and winset concepts can be useful in answering substantive collective choice questions

welfare implications of the bankruptcy reform act of 1999 abstract in recent years personal bankruptcy has become an important issue to consumers creditors and legislators alike over 40 billion dollars of unsecured debt were discharged in 1998 by 1 44 million households these losses have led legislators to propose a variety of changes in bankruptcy law the most important and recent of which is the bankruptcy reform act of 1999 ba99 i develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of personal bankruptcy to investigate the trade off between the consumption smoothing role of bankruptcy and the interest rate and deadweight costs it imposes i find that stringent means tests would reduce filing rates only slightly and would have only modest welfare consequences on the other hand the elimination of bankruptcy altogether is found to have substantial benefits this result is robust to income shock persistence and to stringency in the application of means tests

majority rule outcomes and the structure of debate in one issue at a time decision making in many group decision making situations such as faculty hiring decisions outcomes are often arrived at by deciding one issue at a time e g first rank then subfield it is well known that procedures limiting votes to separate orthogonal dimensions always result in a unique outcome at the generalized median the median of each separate issue dimension often however there is conflict within groups over what ought to be the relevant orthogonal dimensions within which choices will be made we show that the way in which debate is structured i e the way in which the dimensions of choice are specified can have important consequences for what outcome gets chosen however we also show that the range of outcomes that could arise from alternative structurings of the decision process is bounded these bounds are expressed relative to the yolk a sphere located centrally in the pareto set whose existence was first noted by tullock 1967 262 and whose properties have recently been developed by mckelvey 1986 and feld et al 1987 we find that in m orthogonal dimensions the feasible outcomes must lie within mathtype mtef 2 1 feaafiart1ev1aaatcvaufebsjuyzl2yd9gzlbvynv2caerbulwbln hiov2dgi1btfmbaexatlxbi9gbaerbd9wdylwzybitldharqqtubsr 4rnchbgeagqivu0je9sqqrpepc0xbbl8f4rqqrffpeea0xe9lq jc9 vqaqpepm0xbba9pwe9q8fs0 yqaqpepae9pg0firpepekkfr0xfr x fr xb9adbaqaaegacigaaiaabeqaamaabaabaagcbawaaoaaaeaaca qgtbaaleqaaaaa 36f8 sqrt text m radii of the center of the yolk

house prices and credit constraints making sense of the us experience most us house price models break down in the mid 2000s due to the omission of exogenous changes in mortgage credit supply associated with the sub prime mortgage boom from house price to rent ratio and inverted housing demand models previous models lack data on credit constraints facing first time home buyers incorporating a measure of credit conditions the cyclically adjusted loan to value ratio for first time buyers into house price to rent ratio models yields stable long run relationships more precisely estimated effects reasonable speeds of adjustment and improved model fits

innovation needs patents reform abstract the international patent system demonstrates many failures to adapt to new ways of producing information the coming of antibiotics finally forced it to take account of the shift from individual to corporate invention by establishing new criteria for patentability however these favour industries which can operate a portfolio approach in their r d to the disadvantage of other industries and smaller firms in all industries in complex technologies whose economic importance has been growing rapidly patents are now used as much as a bargaining currency to prevent lock out from use of state of the art components developed by competitors as they are as a stimulus to r d changes which have been proposed to deal with these problems including empirical supporting evidence are discussed these include compulsory expert arbitration of disputes with legal aid for the respondent party in the event of an appeal to the courts an innovation warrant as a supplementary type of protection and shared risk compulsory licensing as a practical way of changing from time to money as the measure of a grant this would give multiple innovators access to inventions as early as possible while maintaining or even improving incentives to invest in invention and innovation

what s in a sign trademark law and economic theory the aim of this paper is to summarize the extant theory as it relates to the economics of trademark and to give some suggestions for further research with reference to distinct streams of literature the proposed line of study inevitably looks at the complex relationship between signs and economics copyright 2006 the authors journal compilation 2006 blackwell publishing ltd

copyright and artists a view from cultural economics most of the standard economic literature on copyright ignores a number of aspects that have considerable significance for cultural production and for artists the primary creators of copyright works the supply of which copyright is supposed to stimulate specifically there is little mention in that literature of moral rights no distinction is made between copyright for authors and neighbouring rights for performers the distributional effects of copyright are barely referred to and the question of how much artists earn from copyright is ignored in this article i survey work that relates copyright and cultural economics showing that cultural economics offers another view to the standard economics of copyright moreover the case for government intervention in the arts and heritage made by cultural economists has resonance for the economic rationale of copyright

covering dominance and institution free properties of social change this paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules specifically in a multidimensional setting where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences it is shown that the uncovered set contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings the three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate cooperative behavior in small committees and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously because of its apparent institution free properties the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist a general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven and for the downsian case bounds for the uncovered set are computed these bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

human development and economic sustainability abstract this paper attempts to integrate the concern for human development in the present with that in the future in arguing for sustainable human development it appeals to the notion of ethical universalism an elementary demand for impartiality of claims applied within and between generations economic sustainability is often seen as a matter of intergenerational equity but the specification of what is to be sustained is not always straightforward the addendum explores the relationship between distributional equity sustainable development optimal growth and pure time preference

university research intellectual property rights and european innovation systems this paper surveys the literature on university patenting from the point of view of the economic theory of patents it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme i e they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge in the debate surrounding the so called bayh dole act in the usa it has however been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms the first part of the paper addresses two major questions first what is the economic logic of bayh dole and second what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop in the second part the paper addresses the issue of whether bayh dole like legislation would be beneficial for european countries in a number of european countries a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six european countries an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in europe because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in europe the paper ends with a discussion of how this european practice of university patenting affects public private knowledge transfer in europe and how this compares to the effects of the bayh dole act in the usa

pluralism and social choice pluralist political theory identifies certain patterns of political preferences as promoting the stability of democratic political systems and others as threatening to such stability social choice theory likewise identifies certain patterns of political preferences as leading to stability in social choice under majority rule and related collective decision rules and other patterns as leading to unstable social choice but the preference patterns identified by pluralist theory as promoting stability are essentially those identified by social choice theory as entailing instability thus the notions of stability and the implicit normative criteria associated with the two theories are very close to being logically incompatible this incompatibility suggests that the social choice ideal of collective rationality may not be one that we should endorse indeed the generic instability of the pluralist political process and its consequent collective irrationality may contribute to the stability of pluralist political systems

condorcet winners and the paradox of voting probability calculations for weak preference orders choice literature given this problem social choice theorists have attempted to estimate the probability of condorcet winners given certain empirical or theoretical conditions we shall estimate the probabilities of condorcet winners and intransitive aggregate orders for various numbers of individuals with strong or weak preference orders across various numbers of alternatives we find using computer simulation a stark contrast between these estimates assuming strong individual preferences and the estimates allowing for individuals indifference between pairs of alternatives in contrast to earlier work which depends on the strong preference assumption we suggest that the problem is most acute for small committee decision making and least acute for mass elections with few alternatives

indigenous knowledge and intellectual property a sustainability agenda the paper argues that the current ways of protecting intellectual property are limited in their scope for recognizing indigenous rights to indigenous knowledge indigenous knowledge is often defined as being holistic and collectively owned and an appropriate protection should allow for maintaining the cultural and physical environment that has generated it after examining the failure of the patent system to recognize indigenous input using examples from the us patent and trademark office the analysis is directed towards alternatives the world s first case of indigenous intellectual accreditation through the partnership between mt romance australian sandalwood company aveda us based multinational cosmetics corporation and the kutkabubba community represented by the songman circle of wisdom is presented the accreditation allows for the indigenous people to be recognized as traditional owners of the land and for their care and knowledge about the sandalwood trees it also gives them a share of the profits made from the contemporary use of the pure sandalwood oil the paper argues that sustainability and indigenous sustainability in particular provides a conceptual framework for a change in the way of protecting intellectual property this implies that appropriate policies should be put in place for businesses to feel responsible towards the community

stability and centrality of legislative choice in the spatial context majority rule spatial voting games lacking a core still always present a near core outcome more commonly known as the copeland winner this is the alternative that defeats or ties the greatest number of alternatives in the space previous research has not tested the copeland winner as a solution concept for spatial voting games without a core lacking a way to calculate where the copeland winner was with an infinite number of alternatives we provide a straightforward algorithm to find the copeland winner and show that it corresponds well to experimental outcomes in an important set of experimental legislative voting games we also provide an intuitive motivation for why legislative outcomes in the spatial context may be expected to lie close to the copeland winner finally we show a connection between the copeland winner and the shapley value and provide a simple but powerful algorithm to calculate the copeland scores of all points in the space in terms of the modified power values of each of the voters and their locations in the space

towards a theory of bicameralism the neglected contributions of the calculus of consent in the calculus of consent 1962 235 buchanan and tullock assert 1 ceteris paribus while a coalition controlling less than a majority of voters may control in either chamber the greater the difference in the bases of representation in the two houses the less likely is any given coalition of voters to control a majority of the seats in both chambers 2 the potential of cross chamber logrolls on issues of unequal intensity increases the likelihood that a minority may effectively control policy making we link these ideas to social theory approaches to bicameralism and for the empirical study of legislatures

leverage and the foreclosure crisis how much of the foreclosure crisis can be explained by the large number of high leverage mortgages originated during the housing boom in our model heterogeneous households select from mortgages with different down payments and choose whether to default given income and housing shocks the use of low down payment loans is initially limited by payment to income requirements but becomes unrestricted during the boom the model approximates key housing and mortgage market facts before and after the crisis a counterfactual experiment suggests that the increased number of high leverage loans originated prior to the crisis can explain over 60 percent of the rise in foreclosure rates

the core and the stability of group choice in spatial voting games the core of a voting game is the set of undominated outcomes that is those that once in place cannot be overturned for spatial voting games a core is structurally stable if it remains in existence even if there are small perturbations in the location of voter ideal points while for simple majority rule a core will exist in games with more than one dimension only under extremely restrictive symmetry conditions we show that for certain supramajorities a core must exist we also provide conditions under which it is possible to construct a structurally stable core if there are only a few dimensions our results demonstrate the stability properties of such frequently used rules as two thirds and three fourths we further explore the implications of our results for the nature of political stability by looking at outcomes in experimental spatial voting games and at belgian cabinet formation in the late 1970s

joint dynamics of house prices and foreclosures this paper studies the joint transitional dynamics of the foreclosures and house prices in a standard life cycle incomplete markets model with housing and a realistic long term mortgage structure we calibrate our model to match several long term features of the u s housing market and analyze the effects of several unexpected and permanent shocks on the house price and the foreclosure rate both across the steady states and along the transition between the steady states we examine permanent unexpected shocks to the risk free interest rate the minimum down payment ratio and unemployment during the transition these shocks create large movements in house prices more importantly the foreclosure dynamics are quite significant along the transition compared to the steady state changes and there are strong feedbacks between foreclosures and house prices we assess the effects of a temporary reduction in the risk free interest rate which has moderate effects on house prices but little effect on foreclosure dynamics we also study the effects of an ex ante macroprudential policy which establishes a minimum down payment requirement at a higher threshold such a macroprudential policy helps substantially stabilize both house prices and foreclosures

the strongly stable core in weighted voting games the problems associated with the concept of the core in spatial voting games such as non existence and instability are well documented the structurally stable core presented by schofield attempts to resolve these problems by looking at the subset of the core which is still nonempty after a small change in voter preferences although this concept combined with the adoption of supramajoritarian voting rules and weighted voting games may very well explain the observed stability in reality it may not be suitable for certain coalition situations this article proposes a new solution concept the strongly stable core the conditions for the existence and the potential location of the strongly stable core are then explored and compared with those of the structurally stable core

logical deficiencies in spatial models a constructive critique a fundamental property of any good theoryis logical consistency however two commonassumptions in the rational choice approach topolitical analysis that induced preferences overpolicy are separable and that such preferences areindependent of changes in exogenous factors are notconsistent with the archetypal assumptions ofindividual utility maximization these particularpathologies of spatial models of politics have notbeen well recognized in the political scienceliterature

expectations and informal rules in coalition formation why do informal rules emerge alongside and at variance with the formal constitutional constraints that shape bargaining over coalition governments the presence of informal rules at odds with formal rules appears as an anomaly within both institution free and institution focused theories of coalitions the author argues that politicians create informal rules in order to alter formal institutions that do not function to their benefit the costs of a formal change in institutions offer incentives to politicians to invent informal rules as alternatives to such change and repeated interactions teach politicians what to expect and then invent the author s emphasis on the manipulability of rules echoes long standing themes in the study and practice of politics

the costs of coalition coalition theories and italian governments governments in italy both change and remain the same from 1946 to 1992 the christian democratic party always held governing power but almost no cabinet stayed in office more than a few years and many governments collapsed after only a few months how can instability coexist with stability in this way how can governments break up at such low cost and with so little effect on alternation these questions are rooted in but not resolved by the available game theoretic literature on coalitional behavior my answer is that politicians purposive actions can reduce the costs of coalition i argue that the costs of making breaking and maintaining coalitions depend on political institutions and on the array of parties and voters in policy space institutional and spatial conditions structure politicians opportunities and attempts to lower costs under some conditions as i show coalitions are cheap and politicians can easily make coalitions even cheaper the inference is that this framework comprehends both italy s extremes and the degrees of stability found in other parliamentary democracies