explaining party ideological stances we apply the iterative algorithm by merrill and adams political analysis 9 347 361 2001 to compute the optimal positions of vote maximizing parties along a one dimensional space for a large number of elections this allows us to systematically evaluate factors that push parties toward more centrifugal locations in equilibrium our findings largely corroborate expectations suggested by the theoretical literature albeit with one notable exception the relative size of a partisan constituency reduces rather than enhances the likelihood of a party having an extreme optimal position we then compare derived equilibrium positions with actual party positions with the aim of understanding the nature of electoral incentives and offering insights about party system competition in particular we show that the age of a party the party family to which it belongs post election expectations and internal rules for candidate and leader selection are all factors that increase the probability of a party approaching the position predicted by pure vote maximizing considerations

multiparty electoral competition in the netherlands and germany a model based on multinomial probit a typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share here we use euro barometer survey data and european elite study data from 1979 for the netherlands and germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response based on multinomial probit estimation for each of these countries we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model the latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics the pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions we use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions we go on to propose a model of internal party decision making based both on pre election electoral estimation and post election coalition bargaining this model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions we argue that maximizing expected vote will not in general be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation

issue voting as a constrained choice problem prevalent models of issue voting view vote choice as a choice among party policies choice sets are implicitly assumed to be the same for all voters and their composition is left to researchers discretion this article aims to relax such assumptions by presenting a model with a varying probability of inclusion in the choice set we apply the constrained choice conditional logistic regression to survey data from the 1989 parliamentary election in norway to examine the effects of party identification of voters and electoral viability and policy extremity of parties on individual voters choice set compositions further we look into the effect of parties policy positions on their electoral fates under alternative assumptions about the composition of voters choice sets we find that voters choice set composition conditions both the effects of their policy considerations on vote choice and those of parties policy offerings on their electoral fates

nonconvexity efficiency and equilibrium in exhaustible resource depletion we consider the problem of efficiency and existence of a competitive equilibrium in exhaustible resource markets where extraction costs are nonconvex nonconvexity is shown to imply that 1 efficient extraction ceases to the left of the minimum efficient scale i e where average costs exceed marginal costs and 2 a competitive equilibrium does not exist introduction of a backstop technology which induces a flat portion of the industry demand curve restores both existence and efficiency provided that the backstop price is sufficiently low if firms face even a small amount of uncertainty regarding their rivals stocks a backstop technology is sufficient to restore existence of competitive equilibrium even if the backstop price is very high in this case however the competitive equilibrium is not efficient

a microeconometric test of the theory of exhaustible resources abstract this paper generalizes extant developments of the economic theory of exhaustible resource production derives and extends a halvorsen and smith 1991 quarterly journal of economics 106 123 140 type test of the theory and applies the test to a sample of natural gas resources to facilitate our empirical test we extend the model developed in chermak and patrick 1995 journal of environmental economics and management 28 174 189 to explicitly account for the fact that the extracted resource gross product must be processed to obtain the final saleable product duality theory is used to derive econometric models with which the theory is statistically tested using panel data from 29 natural gas wells shadow prices of the resource stock through time which are generally unobservable but necessary for the test are estimated via the indirect cost function contrary to the extant literature we find inter alia that i at any point in time ceteris paribus the in situ resource price a decreases with gross production and b increases with final production and ii we cannot reject the theory of exhaustible resources i e producer behavior is consistent with the theory

competitive equilibria in exhaustible resource markets with decreasing costs a comment on eswaran lewis and heaps s demonstration of nonexistence in a recent article eswaran lewis and heaps 1983 elh correctly pointed out that many analyses of exhaustible resource markets assume the existence of a competitive equilibrium for the industry without checking to see if such an equilibrium is consistent with the behavior of the industry s constituent mining firms elh have attempted to rectify this situation by analyzing the behavior of an industry s firms and seeing if that behavior is consistent with the existence of a competitive equilibrium elh reach the startling conclusion that it takes nothing more than firms with u shaped average cost curves implying an initial range of increasing returns to scale to eliminate the existence of a competitive equilibrium on its own terms elhi s analysis is sound and provides a needed corrective to a major oversight in the literature however given the dramatic nature of their conclusion the assumptions on which elh s analysis is based require careful scrutiny on this score it seems to me that elh s assumptions are implicitly at odds with the conditions that economists usually think of as characterizing competitive price taking behavior to show this elh s analysis is summarized in section i so as to emphasize that their results depend crucially on the assumption that the number of producing firms cannot be treated as a continuously changing variable over time in section ii intertemporal equilibrium is characterized for the case where the number of producing firms is treated as a continuous variable and it is argued that this assumed continuity is not only convenient but actually required for consistency with the assumption of competitive price taking behavior then to further demonstrate the dependence of the nonexistence result on continuity assumptions an equilibrium solution is computed for a specific case set in discrete time section iii contains conclusions

issues economics and the dynamics of multiparty elections the british 1987 general election we offer a model of multiparty elections that combines voters retrospective economic evaluations with consideration of parties issue positions and the issue preferences of voters we show that both policy issues and the state of the economy matter in british elections in 1987 voters made a largely retrospective evaluation of the conservatives based on economic performance those who rejected the conservative party chose between labour and alliance based on issue positions through simulations we move the parties in the issue space and reestimate vote shares as well as hypothesize an alternative distribution of views on the economy and we show that labour had virtually no chance to win with a centrist party as a viable alternative the predictions from our 1987 simulations are supported in an analysis of the 1992 british election we argue for multinomial probit in studying three party elections because it allows for a richer formulation of politics than do competing methods

a statistical model for multiparty electoral data we propose an internally consistent and comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty district level aggregate election data this model can be used to explain or predict how the geographic distribution of electoral results depends upon economic conditions neighborhood ethnic compositions campaign spending and other features of the election campaign or characteristics of the aggregate areas we also provide several new graphical representations for help in data exploration model evaluation and substantive interpretation although the model applies more generally we use it to help resolve an important controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in great britain contrary to previous analyses which are all based on measures now known to be biased we demonstrate that the incumbency advantage is small but politically meaningful we also find that it differs substantially across the parties about half a percent for the conservatives 1 for the labor party and 3 for the liberal party and its successors also contrary to previous research we show that these effects have not grown in recent years finally we are able to estimate from which party each party s incumbency advantage is predominantly drawn

diversification patterns and survival as firms mature we focus on the relationship between age and diversification patterns of german machine tool manufacturers in the post war era we distinguish between minor diversification adding a new product variation within a familiar submarket and major diversification expanding the product portfolio into new submarkets our analysis reveals four main insights first we observe that firms have lower diversification rates as they grow older and that eventually diversification rates even turn negative for old firms on average where negative diversification corresponds to exit from certain product lines second we find that product portfolios of larger firms tend to be more diversified third with respect to consecutive diversification activities quantile autoregression plots show that firms experiencing diversification in one period are unlikely to repeat this behavior in the following year fourth survival estimations reveal that diversification activities reduce the risk of exit in general and to a varying degree at different ages these results are interpreted using penrosean growth theory

why candidate divergence should be expected to be just as great or even greater in competitive seats as in non competitive ones basic downsian theory predicts candidate convergence toward the views of the median voter in two candidate elections common journalistic wisdom moreover leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to be strongest when elections are expected to be close yet the available evidence from the us congress disconfirms this prediction to explain this counterintuitive result we develop a spatial model that allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competition partisan loyalties and incentives for voter turnout that can lead office seeking candidates especially candidates in close elections to emphasize policy appeals to their voter base rather than courting the median voter

competition in markets for depletable resources with setup costs this paper analyzes the impact on exhaustible resource markets of setup costs a sparsely analyzed category of nonconvex production technologies this paper proves that even under idealized circumstances for competition a competitive equilibrium will fail to exist in the presence of setup costs for any utility and cost functions such that a planner would exploit exhaustible resource pools sequentially

lessons in disguise multivariate predictive mistakes in collective choice models many political processes can be characterized as repeated collective decisions in which individual choices rendered by the same actors are combined to produce salient outcomes e g voting in legislatures the inherent interdependence among the choices within repeated collective decisions is often missed in statistical analysis i introduce the joint prediction error jpe a grouping of individual decisions that is poorly predicted by a model jpes capture the intersecting information missed by conventional diagnostics i demonstrate the use of jpes on data from two published articles one on u s supreme court voting and another on international defense alliances

price scarcity rent and a modified r per cent rule for non renewable resources since hotelling s seminal paper on the optimal depletion of exhaustible resources much has been published yet confusion remains about whether scarcity rent and price increase or decrease as a resource is depleted when costs tend to rise with depletion we show that hotelling s fundamental results of rising scarcity rent and price paths are sustained and that the path of scarcity rent converges on the r per cent rule provided the objective function is concave predictions of non monotonic or declining scarcity rent paths are due to implicit assumptions that lead to a non concave objective function we identify the sources of these non concavities jel classification q30 d90 c60 prix rente de rarete et une regle modifiee du r pourcent pour les ressources non renouvelables malgre la volumineuse litterature specialisee qui a fleuri depuis qu hotelling a ecrit son memoire fondateur sur l epuisement optimal des ressources renouvelables une grande confusion regne toujours quand il faut etablir si la rente de rarete et le prix augmentent ou chutent a proportion que la ressource s epuise quand les couts tendent a croitre avec l epuisement ce memoire montre que les resultats fondamentaux obtenus par hotelling quant aux sentiers de croissance de la rente de rarete et du prix tiennent toujours et que le sentier de croissance de la rente de rarete converge vers la regle du r pourcent pourvu que la fonction objective soit concave les predictions de sentiers de croissance non monotone ou de declin de la rente de rarete presentees dans la litterature specialisee sont attribuables a des postulats implicites qui engendrent une fonction objective non concave les auteurs identifient les sources de ces non concavites

the impact of modes of entry and resource fit on modes of exit by multibusiness firms this study examines the choices of modes of entry and exit in the process of new business exploration we find that exit mode choices are determined by a different set of factors from those that are important for the entry mode decision and the exit decision per se our study indicates that when the resource profiles of a parent firm and the business unit are more dissimilar and there has been less development of firm specific idiosyncratic assets firms are more likely to sell businesses than dissolve them further the study reports a strong relationship between the mode of exit from a line of business sell off vs dissolution and the original mode of entry acquisition versus internal development copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

multicandidate equilibrium in american elections the united states presidential election of 1992 is anexample of a multicandidate contest involving bothdemocratic and republican candidates using a spatialmodelling approach i analyze candidate policystrategy for such elections under the assumption thatvoters choose according to the multivariate votingmodel of behavioral research this model representsvoters decisions as probabilistic functions of theirpolicy preferences and political partisanship isuggest reasons why partisan voting motivatescandidates to locate near their party s partisans inthe policy space and illustrate this argument withrespect to the 1992 presidential election the resultsof computer simulations suggest that these motivationslead to multicandidate spatial equilibria which arerobust to changes in the model s parameters partisanship appears to be an important source ofstability in multicandidate electoral competition

when do spinouts enhance parent firm performance evidence from the u s automobile industry 1890 1986 spinouts entrepreneurial ventures founded by ex employees of incumbent firms within the same industry have emerged in numerous industries some existing literature argues that they typically have a negative association with their parents performance because of the loss of human capital the disruption of organizational routines and subsequent adverse competitive effects more recent work however suggests that such negative effects may have been overstated and argues that there are conditions under which spinouts may be linked to enhanced performance of the parent i contribute to this literature by theorizing about and empirically testing for such conditions in particular using data from the u s automobile industry spanning 1890 to 1986 i find evidence that spinouts are associated with enhanced parent performance when they increase the parent s corporate coherence either through a the core competencies and capabilities domain by refocusing the parent s resources on the core or b the cognitive path by resolving a conflict at the top level of the parent s hierarchy i discuss implications for both research and practice

exhaustible resources non convexity and competitive equilibrium theoretical underpinnings of competitive equilibrium in an exhaustible resource market with non convex u shaped costs are proposed the analysis extends to intertemporal production novshek and sonnenschein s approximation of static competitive equilibrium by limits of cournot equilibria a problem with using novshek and sonnenschein s method is that oligopolistic equilibrium even an open loop equilibrium to which limits might be applied does not exist when there is a non convex technology using epsilon equilibrium as the equilibrium concept finesses this problem there are two types of limiting competitive equilibrium a third type of competitive equilibrium that has been prominent in the literature is found to be inconsistent with limiting approximations

competitor analysis and foothold moves a foothold is a small position that a firm intentionally establishes within a market in which it does not yet compete we extend theory on competitive dynamics to examine relationships between comp

when politics and models collide estimating models of multiparty elections theory the spatial model of elections can better be represented by using conditional logit models which consider the position of the parties in issue spaces than by multinomial logit models which only consider the position of voters in the issue space the spatial model and random utility models in general suffer from a failure to adequately consider the substitutability of parties sharing similar or identical issue positions hypotheses multinomial logit is not necessarily better than successive applications of binomial logit conditional logit allows for considering more interesting political questions than does multinomial logit the spatial model may not correspond to voter decision making in multiple party settings multinomial probit allows for a relaxation of the iia condition and this should improve estimates of the effect of adding or removing parties methods comparisons of binomial logit multinomial logit conditional logit and multinomial probit on simulated data and survey data from multiparty elections results multinomial logit offers almost no benefits over binomial logit conditional logit is capable of examining movements by parties whereas multinomial logit is not multinomial probit performs better than conditional logit when considering the effects of altering the set of choices available to voters estimation of multinomial probit with more than three choices is feasible

modeling choice of fuelwood source among rural households in malawi a multinomial probit analysis abstract this paper addresses two questions what determines household s choice of fuelwood source and what are the environmental consequences of fuelwood collection choices we address these questions by estimating the multinomial probit model using survey data for households surrounding chimaliro and liwonde forest reserves in malawi after controlling for heterogeneity among households we find strong substitution opportunities across fuelwood collection sources attributes of the fuelwood sources size and species composition and distance to the sources are the most important determinants of fuelwood choice further results show that customary managed forests generate environmental benefits by reducing pressure on both plantation forests and forest reserves these findings support the need to strengthen community based institutions to manage local forest resources

pre electoral commitments and government formation recent studies show that pre electoral commitments and the ideological distance between parties influence government formation but do pre electoral pacts or rejections of party combinations really have an independent impact on the outcome of the government formation game which policy areas matter when parties agree to build a coalition this paper addresses these questions by applying a dataset that includes information on preferred rejected coalition partners and the policy area specific programmatic heterogeneity of all potential coalitions the results show that pre electoral commitments have a significant impact on government formation after controlling for endogeneity problems there is also evidence that not only diversity in economic issues determines the partisan composition of governments

testing the efficiency of extraction from a stock resource the theoretical conditions for efficient extraction from a known stock resource by a competitive mining firm are reviewed these conditions are tested using proprietary data from a mining firm output price data and coefficient estimates from a translog cost system are used to compute the in situ value of the resource and the stock effect changes in the in situ value over time are then statistically compared with the expected price path the results reject the hypothesis that the data are consistent with the theoretical model and the maintained hypotheses variations of the basic model that incorporate a time varying discount rate an alternative expected price series and a constraint on the rate of output are also tested and rejected 46 references 10 tables

sequential development and exploitation of an exhaustible resource do monopoly rights promote conservation this paper explores the problem of sequential exploitation of exhaustible resources by a monopolist when a setup cost must be incurred to access the next pool under certain circumstances the monopolist will always follow a more conservationist path of extraction and delay the introduction of new resource pools compared to a social planner however with other forms of consumer demand the monopolist may exhaust the resource more quickly especially if many new options will follow these results may apply especially to depletable resources like antibiotics or biotech products for which significant research and development costs are required followed by monopoly rights conferred by patents

on the nonexistence of market equilibria in exhaustible resource markets with decreasing costs this paper examines the existence of competitive equilibria in markets for exhaustible resources where there are initial economies of scale in either the extraction of the resource or the utilization of the resource as an input in production in such instances which are fairly common we find that the classic hotelling rule for competitive extraction does not apply since competitive price equilibria generally do not exist this is in marked contrast to static markets where the usual textbook example of firms with u shaped average cost curves is not inconsistent with the existence of competitive equilibria furthermore oligopolistic market equilibria in which resource firms act as nash producers may also fail to exist when there are returns to scale in production

an evolutionary perspective on diversification and corporate restructuring entry exit and economic performance during 1981 89 this study proposes a theoretical perspective that firms engage in continuous search and selection activities in order to improve their knowledge base and thereby improve their performance this general framework is applied to the context of corporate evolution entry and exit activities are understood as search and selection undertaken by the firm to improve their performance one of the compelling features of this framework is that firms learn from their past entry experience and approach the next entry in a more focused and directed manner over time also firms acquire additional knowledge from each entry event while applying their existing knowledge base with a longitudinal 1981 89 data base on entry and exit activities of all publicly traded manufacturing firms in the united states this study shows that applicability of the firm s knowledge base plays an important role in predicting which businesses a firm enters or exits finns sequentially enter businesses of similar human resource profiles and firms are more likely to divest lines of business of different profiles corporate level analysis shows that such well directed entry and exit contribute to the improvement of a firm s profitability

on equilibrium in resource markets with scale economies and stochastic prices abstract in this paper i show the existence and the characteristics of equilibrium in a non renewable resource market where extraction costs are non convex and market price is subject to stochastic shocks an empirically relevant setting in my model firms may be motivated to hold inventories to facilitate production smoothing which allows them to continue producing at a smooth pace at any instant when extraction ceases e g when reserves are exhausted this aspect of the model then supports a competitive equilibrium in the presence of non convex costs casual empirical evidence is provided that supports the central features of my model for a variety of non renewable resources lending credence to the explanation for equilibrium i propose

policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies what accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation i introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence 1 a model which incorporates candidate specific variables so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy related electoral advantages or disadvantages 2 a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters candidate utilities thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds i report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model i then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results

corporate and industry effects on business unit competitive position we partition the variances of market shares which we use as surrogates for competitive position of the business units of all public manufacturing companies available in the trinet data base into industry factors corporate parent specific factors and business unit specific factors our results differ somewhat from rumelt s 1991 which decomposed variances in profitability we find that corporate parent effects on market share are considerably greater than zero when lines of business are defined more narrowly when small business units are included and when firms are medium sized our results suggest that the relative importance of corporate industry and business unit effects depends on the types of criteria such as the level of industry aggregation whether small business units are included and firm size that are used to construct samples copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

heightening comparativists concern for model choice voting behavior in great britain and the netherlands as the research methodology more closely approximates the causal process being analyzed the inferences and predictions derived from that methodology will better represent actual behavior statistical models were specified on the basis of accepted theories of voting behavior and political cleavages in the netherlands and great britain we hypothesize that multinomial models provide a more accurate characterization of voting behavior in countries with more than two political parties competing for votes binomial logit multinomial logit and nested multinomial logit models of voting behavior are estimated on dutch and british national election study data compared to binomial methods we find that multinomial models of voting behavior produce results that are more congruent with accepted theories of dutch and british politics

parent firm performance across international joint venture life cycle stages the benefits that firms obtain from investing in international joint ventures ijvs can be reinforced or reduced by the management of later stages of collaboration this paper presents an analysis of the shareholder wealth effects of ijv formation and five types of ijv termination the empirical findings challenge common assumptions in the ijv literature contrast prior evidence on the performance implications of market entry and exit through acquisitions and divestitures and demonstrate the value of integrating ijv life cycle stages in future research

an empirical analysis of household energy choice in ghana abstract using data from two recently available living standards surveys we trace the dynamics in cooking fuel choice among ghanaian households over the period 2005 6 and 2012 13 and further investigate the main forces driving households choice of a cooking fuel evidence from this paper reveals a significant transition from fuelwood use towards lpg over the period results further reveal factors such as price reliability in supply of lpg income and other household attributes as significant factors influencing households choice of a given energy type for cooking relevant policy prescriptions are offered to engender sustainable energy use and reduce over reliance on the already depleted forest resources for biomass energy

the mean voter theorem necessary and sufficient conditions for convergent equilibrium formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution this paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence valence can be interpreted as the non policy basis of political judgement made by the electorate concerning the quality of political contenders the theorem presented here shows that there is a necessary condition for convergence the condition involves the difference in party valences and the electoral variance when the condition fails the low valence parties will be forced to adopt policy positions far from the electoral centre the inference appears to be substantiated by an empirical model of the israel election in 1996 copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

closure and divestiture by foreign entrants the impact of entry and post entry strategies we analyze the longevity of foreign entrants explicitly considering two possible ways of exit firm closure and capital divestiture we find that entry and post entry strategies affect the longevity of firms and of foreign equity holdings but in different manners while the ownership arrangements and organizational structure affect the likelihood of divestment they exert no significant effect upon closure the entry mode exerts opposite effects on the two modes of exit greenfield entrants being more likely to shutdown but less likely to be divested only human capital affects closure and divestment in the same manner firms with large endowments of human capital are less likely to exit irrespective of the exit mode considered copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

who wins determining the party of the prime minister the prime ministership is the preeminent political post in parliamentary democracies yet few studies examine pm party choice perhaps under the assumption that the choice is a simple function of party size in this article we argue that key strategic actors and the context in which government negotiations take place can play a critical role in pm party choice we test our hypotheses using a mixed logit with random coefficients on an original data set comprising pm selection opportunities in 28 european countries our methodological approach allows us to incorporate qualitative concerns about heterogeneity and causal complexity into our analysis contrary to conventional wisdom we find that the largest party is often disadvantaged when it comes to pm party choice that some presidents play an influential role in choosing the pm and that the value of being the incumbent depends on one s performance in office and how the previous government ended

the strategic sources of foreign policy substitution while a growing body of work provides empirical support for the notion that political leaders substitute foreign policies depending on a variety of domestic political and economic conditions little work examines the underlying strategic causes of substitution this article argues that foreign states behave strategically in order to a avoid becoming the targets of domestically troubled executives or b to take advantage of the domestic trouble another state endures such strategic interaction delimits the set of foreign policies reasonably available to leaders in trouble at home thus producing the impetus for policy substitution this article develops a theoretical model of strategic behavior and policy substitution and reports empirical results of a multivariate probit model

the effects of alternative power sharing arrangements do moderating institutions moderate party strategies and government policy outputs advocates of consensual political institutions i e institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs to date however there exists little research either theoretical or empirical that evaluates whether consensual institutions promote moderation in parties policy declarations we develop a multiparty spatial model with policy seeking parties operating under proportional representation in which we vary the extent to which government policies reflect power sharing among all parties as opposed to being determined by a single party we determine parties optimal nash equilibrium policy positions and conclude that power sharing does not typically motivate parties to moderate their policy declarations in fact policy positioning under power sharing appears to be similar to or more extreme than under single party dominance consistent with previous research however we find that power sharing does promote moderation in government policy outputs our results have implications for parties election strategies for the design of political institutions and for representative government

don t stand so close to me spatial contagion effects and party competition in this article we bring together elements from the literatures on economic voting and spatial voting to gain theoretical leverage on the combined role of clarity of responsibility party policy positions and economic performance in elections building on evidence of voter knowledge we develop a theory of spatial contagion effects to explain how factors drawn from both of these literatures combine to shape changes in support for political parties we test this theory with a spatial autoregressive model of party competition in 23 nations from 1951 to 2005 as expected we find evidence of strong spatial contagion effects in elections with low clarity of responsibility

a note on extraction with nonconvex costs in a recent article eswaran lewis and heaps 1983 elh model a market for an exhaustible resource in which each firm owns r units of the resource and can extract at a rate of q units for a cost of c q c o 0 and average extraction costs c q q are assumed to exhibit economies of scale initially and reach a minimum at q q marginal cost is always positive but it decreases until q q and then increases i e total cost is not convex the resource cannot be stored once it has been extracted demand does not change over time if extraction proceeds at a rate q at time t then price is p q at time t all firms are assumed to know the entire time path of prices at which the resource will be sold time is taken to be continuous firms are assumed to be price takers in the sense that no firm can influence the time path of prices elh conclude that this model has no equilibrium however the model contains some assumptions that are not reasonable this note relaxes those unreasonable assumptions adds a simplifying assumption and produces an equilibrium the conclusion that there is no equilibrium follows from two of elh s most basic conclusions no firm will ever extract at a rate be

the mne as a portfolio interdependencies in mne growth trajectory we conceptualize the mne as a portfolio of interdependent sub units and examine its growth trajectory in relation to its existing portfolio the empirical testing is based on a unique dataset that details all the location moves of us legal services mnes during 1949 2006 these mnes evolve in directions that follow from their past their portfolios affect their subsequent moves speaking for the impact of interdependencies among sub units on the evolution of mnes the portfolio exercises stronger impact on entry than on exit suggesting that different forces affect mnes expansion and contraction we outline strategic and organizational implications of the conceptualization of the mne as a portfolio

a review of research on the growth of multinational enterprises a penrosean lens abstract we provide a comprehensive review of the growth of multinational enterprises mnes based on a quarter century 25 years of scholarly international business publications we synthesize research insights on the determinants of the growth of mnes through the lens of penrose s theory of firm growth which is the most influential theoretical perspective on firm growth the review takes stock of the research findings on the facilitators constraints and the trajectory of growth of mnes and elaborates on the commonalities and differences between research on the growth of mnes that draws on penrose s theory and research that does not this comparison highlights the opportunity to build an internally coherent theory of the growth of mnes that is a theory that connects what an mne is to what determines an mne s growth it also indicates that past research placed a strong emphasis on exogenous factors e g cross country distances as key constraints on growth even though the penrosean lens suggests a close consideration of endogenous factors that drive international growth as well as endogenizing the ostensibly exogenous growth determinants the review highlights the importance of firm specific managerial knowledge and learning which shapes the direction of the growth of mnes and ensures its administrative coherence

a theory of voting in large elections this paper provides a game theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections in our model voters strategies form a quantal response equilibrium qre which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior we first show that a qre in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates and then proceed to show that with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters utilities a nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory this equilibrium 1 consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters utilities 2 exists even when voters can abstain and 3 is unique when there are only 2 candidates