ants rationality and recruitment this paper offers an explanation of behavior that puzzled entomologists and economists ants faced with two identical food sources were observed to concentrate more on one of these but after a period they would turn their attention to the other the same phenomenon has been observed in humans choosing between restaurants after discussing the nature of foraging and recruitment behavior in ants a simple model of stochastic recruitment is suggested this explains the herding and epidemics described in the literature on financial markets as corresponding to the equilibrium distribution of a stochastic process rather than to switching between multiple equilibria

global ethics of collective internet governance intrinsic motivation and open source software the ethical governance of the global internet is an accelerating global phenomenon a key paradox of the global internet is that it allows individual and collective decision making to co exist with each other open source software oss communities are a globally accelerating phenomenon oss refers to groups of programs that allow the free use of the software and further the code sharing to the general and corporate users of the software the combination of private provision and public knowledge and software and the seeming paradox of economic versus social motivations have stimulated a wide debate between researchers and policymakers in this article we analyze oss communities from the viewpoint of intrinsic motivation knowledge creation and collective internet governance we believe that the growth of global oss has fundamental implications for business ethics and the governance of the global internet in the twenty first century

conditions for economies of scope in the presence of fixed costs this article establishes necessary and sufficient conditions for economies of scope to exist while taking into account the presence or absence of both local cost complementarity and product specific fixed costs in some circumstances the test developed here could show that economies of scope to not exist despite local cost complementarity or alternatively despite the existence of fixed costs conversely the test could show that fixed costs are sufficient to generate economies of scope despite local cost anticomplementarity

nontrade concerns reconciling domestic policy objectives with freer trade in agricultural products since the conclusion of the uruguay round of trade negotiations in 1994 there has been increasing debate about the implications of freer trade for domestic or nontrade objectives in agriculture these range from traditional concerns such as food security and rural development to more recent issues such as the relationship between agriculture and the environment and the effects of agricultural practices on human health and animal welfare for countries reluctant to reduce agricultural protection a key issue is the extent to which domestic policy objectives would need to be sacrificed under freer trade for countries espousing trade liberalization the issue is whether domestic policy objectives will be used as a guise to undermine freer trade in agricultural products in this paper we focus on two areas of concern that are stressed by rich developed countries the linkage between agriculture and the environment and animal welfare environmental issues are prominent in asia europe and increasingly in north america while animal welfare is a major issue in europe it is generally acknowledged that agricultural support provided through implicit consumer taxes and direct subsidies in developed countries generates much of the distortion in global agricultural trade the more than 300 billion of agricultural support that is provided annually by oecd countries disadvantages developing country exporters and causes distortions in importers ensuring that there are effective disciplines on trade distorting forms of support will be vital to the suc

allocable fixed inputs as a cause of joint production a cost function approach the multiproduct cost concepts of baumol panzar and willig are used to explore the contention of shumway pope and nash that allocable fixed inputs cause joint production allocable fixed inputs may create an interdependence in the short run cost function when none exists in the long run however this will not necessarily lead to joint production for joint production to occur in the short run either the short run cost function must exhibit economies of scope or stand alone production of one of the commodities must exhibit diseconomies of size the issue of whether allocable fixed inputs cause joint production is an empirical question

allocable fixed inputs as a cause of joint production an empirical investigation leathers 1991 shows that while the existence of allocable fixed inputs can cause joint production as in shumway pope and nash 1984 it will not necessarily lead to joint production the extent to which allocable fixed inputs cause joint production in agriculture is an empirical question this paper offers an empirical answer by estimating a short run joint cost function it is possible to identify levels of outputs for which joint production may be optimal in the short run but not in the long run only in these output regions will there be jointness caused by allocable fixed inputs for the data in this paper 160 wisconsin farms these output regions are very small thus allocable fixed inputs do not appear to be an important cause of jointness for these farms technical causes of jointness appear to be a significant cause of joint production

land allocation in hyv adoption models an investigation of alternative explanations microeconomic theory provides four competing explanations for partial land allocation to new and traditional seed varieties in hyv adoption decisions input fixity portfolio selection safety first behavior and learning testing a general model that contains each as a special case suggests that they are jointly most likely to explain land allocation in the hyv adoption decisions of malawian smallholders yet when each explanation is tested to the exclusion of the others as is usually the case in the literature competing hypotheses are individually significant results suggest that employing approaches based on single explanations may lead to inappropriately narrow conclusions

pension transfers and farm household technical efficiency evidence from south africa this article analyzes the effect of entitlements from the old age pension program of south africa on household technical efficiency using a sample of farm households in south africa s kwazulu natal province the analysis is at the household level and off farm activities are considered as additional outputs in a nonparametric estimation of technical efficiency this approach captures the jointness between farm and off farm activities the pension s effect is identified by exploiting the age eligibility criteria in the pension program results show a positive effect of the pension and suggest that this large cash transfer can improve households ability to make use of the best available technologies

allocatable fixed inputs and jointness in agricultural production implications for economic modeling allocatable fixed inputs such as land are a potentially important source of jointness in agriculture as with other causes of jointness they necessitate multiple product systems for modeling product supply and input demand in other important ways however their analytical implications are very different from other causes of jointness model specification differs demand functions for the quantities of each input used in the production of individual commodities can be derived if a primal approach is used but such allocation equations cannot in general be identified from a dual specification available allocation data are not even useful in such dual estimations

libre software turning fads into institutions the article presents an economic analysis of libre software and of its sustainability as a new economic model for software we underline the role of libre software development communities and analyze incentives for both kernel and obscure developers we emphasize the role of the so called public licenses to provide an appropriate institutional framework we show that several features of libre software also allow it to improve faster than proprietary software and therefore to achieve strong market performance when competing against existing standards even when proprietary software producers react we illustrate our point using a simple local and global interaction model to study the technological competition between linux and windows on the server operating system os market we finally argue that if sufficient initial momentum could be created through public intervention libre software could turn from a fad into an efficient economic institution to correct inefficiencies due to network externalities

inventories as factors of production and economic fluctuations this paper presents a theory of inventory investment by stage of processing and uses it to examine the role of inventory investment in economic fluctuations the model in which inventories are treated as factors of production is estimated for four durable goods industries three conclusions emerge from the estimation first the estimates generally satisfy the theoretical restrictions second the elasticity of inventory demand with respect to output is high indicating an important accelerator effect finally the estimates suggest that shifts in the demand for inventories are an important source of economic fluctuations copyright 1989 by american economic association

inventories and the volatility of production a stylized fact associated with inventory behavior is that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales this paper presents a model of production decisions with demand uncertainty that incorporates no nnegativity constraints on inventories even with no productivity shocks optimal behavior by the firm is consistent with this stylized fact either if demand exhibits positive serial correlation or if the firm can backlog excess demand the reason is that a demand shock affects both the actual inventory level given unchanged production and the desired level production must replenish the stock and adjust to the new desired level copyright 1987 by american economic association

production economics worthwhile investment abstract agricultural production economics research is examined within a broad framework of scientific development and utilization recent findings in selected areas of the subdiscipline are examined and opportunities for further fruitful inquiry are identified a few stylized facts emerge from recent work and suggest the need for much careful hypothesis testing model exploration and empirical sensitivity analysis in the future

measuring economies of scope for cogeneration systems in korea a nonparametric approach this study empirically identifies the existence and the degree of economies of scope for cogeneration systems in korea we derive the index of economies of scope and estimate it by using a nonparametric approach of linear programming method based on the empirical results we explicitly present that there exist economies of scope for cogeneration in korea with total cost reduction of 13 1 in addition we show that the cost saving effects from the jointness in capital and labor are also significant in addition to that in fuel

efficiency of the multiplant multiproduct firm a general framework is provided for assessing the technology cost and efficient scale of a multiplant multiproduct firm we show sufficient conditions for the existence of a plant cost function and necessary and sufficient conditions for using plant level data to draw exact firm level cost inferences we also distinguish between plant and input nonjointness and show the optimal relation between plant level and firm level cost elasticity in a multiproduct setting the framework is applied to a vegetable processing cooperative which is found to operate below its efficient scale

human capital entrepreneurship and farm household earnings abstract the allocation of resources between agriculture and non agriculture is a central decision of the farm household in this paper we formulate a profit maximization model in which human capital enhances efficiency through both within sector effects and across sector allocation of quasi fixed inputs the model is estimated using chinese household data that contain detailed information on production activities we find that schooling and experience improve the sectoral uses of household supplied inputs accounting for 27 of their total contribution to earnings the evidence suggests that conventional estimates of human capital returns obtained within sectors would undervalue the role of human capital in development

a model of corporate donations to open source under hardware software complementarity in recent years there has been an increasing diffusion of open source projects as well as an increasing interest among scholars on the topic open source software oss is developed by communities of programmers and users usually sponsored by private firms is available in the public domain and redistributed for free we present a model of open and closed source software competition in a differentiated oligopoly of hardware software bundles hardware and software are complement goods and oss is financed by hardware firms results are several hardware firms contribute to the development of open source although the level of contribution is not socially optimal oss availability has a positive impact on hardware firms profits and prices whereas the closed source producer is harmed by oss competition furthermore we analyze under what circumstances hardware firms have incentives in investing in os projects the model can explain the increasing participation in os projects of several embedded device producers and server producers although we focus on hardware this model can be generalized to a wide range of complementary goods and services such as it training web hosting and information and communication technology ict consultancy services

inventories and risk in african manufacturing using a panel data set for zimbabwe which includes firm specific measures of contractual risk we show that contractual risk has a major effect on the holding input stocks and to a lesser extent the constitution of cash reserves this is consistent with inventories being a hedge against stockout risk by contrast firms facing more inter annual market risk hold less inventories this suggests that african manufacturers prefer adapting to long term market fluctuations as they materialise rather than building up inventories this interpretation is consistent with the finding that high market risk firms also have a low capacity utilisation rate

open knowledge disclosure an overview of the evidence and economic motivations abstract this paper reviews current literature on open knowledge disclosure strategies used by firms it is usually acknowledged that for an innovative firm that does not benefit from a natural protection such as lead time advance the best strategy is to keep an innovation secret as long as possible or to protect it through an exclusive patent however in apparent contrast to this traditional view many studies suggest that firms often disclose important parts of their knowledge through scientific publications conferences the internet etc this paper aims to provide an overview first of the evidence supporting the existence of open knowledge disclosure and second of the economic motivations that encourage rational profit seeking firms to adopt these behaviours

the dynamic implications of increasing returns technological change and path dependent inefficiency this paper addresses the issue of path dependent selection and inefficiency counterfactual methods and the empirical evidence employed in this research trajectory the general message is basically that the theoretical argument to prove path dependent inefficiency is relatively straightforward while empirical demonstrations as well as the analysis of welfare implications are much more difficult in the first section we briefly state the basic argument explaining how localized learning leads to an incomplete exploration of the variety distribution of a technology we then synthesize the most interesting historical studies which get potential regret results and ask whether these results suggest a large welfare loss to try to answer this question we start from the critical arguments of liebowitz and margolis to discuss the theoretical and empirical difficulties of establishing path dependent inefficiency