Technical, rigorous, and self-contained, this book will be useful for macroeconomists who seek to improve the robustness of decision-making processes.

This is a set of three volumes containing edited versions of papers and commentaries presented in invited symposium sessions of the Eighth World Congress of the Econometric Society. The papers summarize and interpret recent key developments and discuss future directions in a wide range of topics in economics and econometrics. The papers cover both theory and applications. Written by leading specialists in their fields, these volumes provide a unique survey of progress in the discipline.

This is the first of three volumes containing edited versions of papers and commentaries presented in invited symposium sessions of the Eighth World Congress of the Econometric Society. The papers summarize and interpret recent key developments and discuss future directions in a wide range of topics in economics and econometrics. The papers cover both theory and applications. Written by leading specialists in their fields these volumes provide a unique survey of progress in the discipline.

This is the second of three volumes containing edited versions of papers and commentaries presented in invited symposium sessions of the Eighth World Congress of the Econometric Society. The papers summarize and interpret key developments and discuss future directions in a wide range of topics in economics and econometrics. The papers cover both theory and applications. Written by leading specialists in their fields, these volumes provide a unique survey of progress in the discipline.

This is the third of three volumes containing edited versions of papers and commentaries presented in invited symposium sessions of the Eighth World Congress of the Econometric Society. The papers summarize and interpret recent developments and discuss future directions in a wide range of topics in economics and econometrics. The papers cover both theory and applications. Written by leading specialists in their fields, these volumes provide a unique survey of progress in the discipline.

A principle claiming equal entitlement to continued life has been strongly defended in the literature as a fundamental social value. We refer to this principle as ‘equal value of life'. In this paper we argue that there is a general incompatibility between the equal value of life principle and the weak Pareto principle and provide proof of this under mild structural assumptions. Moreover we demonstrate that a weaker, age-dependent version of the equal value of life principle is also incompatible with (...) the weak Pareto principle. However, both principles can be satisfied if transitivity of social preference is relaxed to quasi-transitivity. Footnotes1 The authors are grateful to Luc Bovens, Kristian Schultz Hansen, Søren Holm, Franz Huber, Wiebke Kuklys, Gabriella Pigozzi, and two anonymous referees for detailed and very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any errors and shortcomings are the responsibility of the authors alone. (shrink)

This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses informed by the critical ambition and conceptual framework offered by Foucault is both desirable and possible. The (...) article then offers some reflections and general guidelines on how to strengthen the methodological quality of Foucauldian analyses. We argue that the quality of Foucauldian-inspired analysis of modern power may gain from methodological reflections around four pointers: curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity. (shrink)

In a recent paper A. Tabarrok [Believe in Pascal’s Wager? Have I Got a Deal for You!, Theory and Decision 48, 123--128, 2000] argued that a believer who accepts Pascal’s Wager should in addition accept payment of any given fee in return for a given increase in the probability of reaching God. However the conclusion is obtained from manipulations of infinities which are not valid in an expected utility model. In this note, an alternative model is formulated in which Tabarrok’s (...) conclusion can be obtained. (shrink)

The concept of need is often proposed as providing an additional or alternative criterion to cost-effectiveness in making allocation decisions in health care. If it is to be of practical value it must be sufficiently precisely characterized to be useful to decision makers. This will require both an account of how degree of need for an intervention is to be determined and a prioritization rule that clarifies how degree of need and the cost of the intervention interact in determining the (...) relative priority of the intervention. Three common features of health care interventions must be accommodated in a comprehensive theory of need: the probabilistic nature of prognosis (with and without the intervention); the time course of effects; and the fact that the most effective treatments often combine more than one intervention. These common features are problematic for the concept of need. We outline various approaches to prioritization on the basis of need and argue that some approaches are more promising than others. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe concept of need is often proposed as providing an additional or alternative criterion to cost‐effectiveness in making allocation decisions in health care. If it is to be of practical value it must be sufficiently precisely characterized to be useful to decision makers. This will require both an account of how degree of need for an intervention is to be determined and a prioritization rule that clarifies how degree of need and the cost of the intervention interact in determining the (...) relative priority of the intervention. Three common features of health care interventions must be accommodated in a comprehensive theory of need: the probabilistic nature of prognosis ; the time course of effects; and the fact that the most effective treatments often combine more than one intervention. These common features are problematic for the concept of need. We outline various approaches to prioritization on the basis of need and argue that some approaches are more promising than others. (shrink)

abstract The argument that scarce health care resources should be distributed so that patients in ‘need’ are given priority for treatment is rarely contested. In this paper, we argue that if need is to play a significant role in distributive decisions it is crucial that what is meant by need can be precisely articulated. Following a discussion of the general features of health care need, we propose three principal interpretations of need, each of which focuses on separate intuitions. Although this (...) account may not be a completely exhaustive reflection of what people mean when they refer to need, the three interpretations provide a starting‐point for further debate of what the concept means in its specific application. We discuss combined interpretations, the meaning of grading needs, and compare needs‐based priority setting to social welfare maximisation. (shrink)

It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? _Releasing the Image_ understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much (...) to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne's painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology. (shrink)

Employing the theory of Birkhoff polarities as a model of model theory yields an inductively defined dual structure which is a formalization of semantics and which allows for simple proofs of some new results for model theory.

The purpose of this paper is to present an algebraic generalization of the traditional two-valued logic. This involves introducing a theory of automorphism algebras, which is an algebraic theory of many-valued logic having a complete lattice as the set of truth values. Two generalizations of the two-valued case will be considered, viz., the finite chain and the Boolean lattice. In the case of the Boolean lattice, on choosing a designated lattice value, this algebra has binary retracts that have the usual (...) axiomatic theory of the propositional calculus as suitable theory. This suitability applies to the Boolean algebra of formalized token models [2] where the truth values are, for example, vocabularies. Finally, as the actual motivation for this paper, we indicate how the theory of formalized token models [2] is an example of a many-valued predicate calculus. (shrink)

This article assesses the value of Karl Popper's situational analysis for contem porary sociology We maintain that this element of Popper's social science methodology has been largely neglected by sociologists and suggest that this is because it is borrowed from economics. As such, situational analysis has much in common with recent attempts to introduce rational choice in sociology. Our main question is this: What is the contribution of situational analysis to the current debate about rational choice in sociology? Our answer (...) is that Popper has little to add to this debate. His formulation of situational analysis is too general and too vague to be much of a guide to research. Among other things, situational analysis fails to pay due attention to interests and to social interaction in the explanation of social phenomena. On the positive side, we notice that Popper does include social institutions as the most important element in individuals' situations. (shrink)

What does it entail to study the climate crisis from – or consistently with – a critical realist perspective? The paper addresses this question in three steps. First, it considers the boundaries of critical realism in relation to climate crisis research. In this context it identifies climate science as a field that in important respects resonates implicitly with critical realism. Conversely, a book by human ecologist Andreas Malm is introduced as an example of a work that, while sympathetic to critical (...) realism, in key respects contradicts core features of it. Second, to illustrate what an analysis of the crisis informed by critical realism can look like, the paper brings into focus the main causes of the climate crisis – including the capitalist growth imperative, neoliberalism, and consumer culture. Finally, the status quo project, the green growth project and the degrowth project are identified as fundamentally different ways of approaching the climate crisis. (shrink)

This article discusses ethnoveterinary medical pluralism in Western Kenya. Qualitative methods of data collection such as key informant interviews, open-ended in-depth interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs), narratives, and participant and direct observations were applied. The study shows that farmers in Nyang’oma seek both curative and preventive medical services for their animals from the broad range of health care providers available to them within a pluralistic medical system. Kleinman’s model of medical pluralism, which describes the professional, folk, and popular sectors, informs (...) this discussion because of its relevance and appropriateness to the study. It is, however, important to note the overlap in the three sectors and to point out that livestock farmers engage in multiple “consultations” based on a combination of their own characteristics and the cost, availability and specialization of health care providers. The study concludes by recognizing the complexity of ethnoveterinary medical pluralism and calls for the integration of a pluralistic perspective into the planning and implementation of animal health care interventions and services. (shrink)

A model of ZFC is constructed in which the distributivity cardinal h is 2 ℵ 0 = ℵ 2 , and in which there are no ω 2 -towers in [ω] ω . As an immediate corollary, it follows that any base-matrix tree in this model has no cofinal branches. The model is constructed via a form of iterated Mathias forcing, in which a mixture of finite and countable supports is used.

In this paper we argue that transnational as well as national political demands and expectations on the educational field are contributing to produce four ideological-based educational leadership discourses in the literature. In order to conceptualize these discourses, we turn to the work of Schmidt and Zizek. On that basis we identify four dominant educational leadership discourses: a personhood-based discourse, a profession-based discourse, a standard-based discourse, and a resource-based discourse. These discourses have—as we will show—various consequences for the way we think (...) and talk about education and educational leadership in our age. Using examples that stem from a project about educational leadership in Danish upper secondary school, we will illustrate how educational leaders’ beings and doings are ‘regulated’ by these discourses, which place them in a tension field where different and conflicting fantasies seem to be played out. Then, we will discuss how these fantasies can be challenged and how we can think and speak more intellectually about education and educational leadership. By using the term intellectual we are referring to educational leaders’ ability as human beings to critically reflect on their contemporary doings and beings within and beyond the existing social order. Hopefully this can help them to establish new ways for discussing not only what educational leadership is and should be about, but also what it could be about. (shrink)

This paper presents an introduction to Arne Grøn’s existential hermeneutics as a philosophical method, while also attempting to indicate how Grøn’s work contributes to and engages in a number of crucial topics in modern continental philosophy. The first section of the paper shows how Grøn draws on Paul Ricoeur and Michael Theunissen to rethink the concept of existence through a reading of Kierkegaard that uncouples this concept from the self-evident status it attained in twenty-century existentialism. The second section of the (...) paper argues that Grøn proposes an existential ethics that takes the Kierkegaardian notion that humans are inherently normative beings and uses this as a basis for a critique of ethics, as well as for establishing an ethics of vision inspired by Kierkegaard. The third section of the paper presents a reading of Grøn’s notion of religion as an inextricable part of human existence. (shrink)

Drawing upon core phenomenological contributions of the last decades, the present paper provides an integrated description of the development of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. Specifically, these contributions are the transitional sequences of development of psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia as envisioned by Klosterkötter and rooted in the basic symptoms approach, Conrad’s Gestalt-analysis of developing psychosis, and Sass and Parnas’ self-disturbance approach. Klosterkötter’s contribution provides a general descriptive psychopathological approach to the transitional sequence of the development of auditory hallucinations. The key concepts (...) in Conrad’s proposal are discussed, as their role is central as driving forces of the process from non-psychotic symptoms to overt hallucinations. Finally, Parnas and Sass link psychiatry to philosophy and psychology, and provide an in-depth and thorough description of these phenomena in their work on schizophrenia as a disorder of consciousness and self-experience with hyper-reflexivity and diminished self-affection as key aspects. (shrink)

Misleading information and unfair commercial practices have to be viewed against the background of what consumers otherwise do, i.e., what their purchase decisions look like when no misleading information or no unfair commercial practices are in place. This article provides some of this background by studying how consumers sample information when making an in-store purchase decision. This was done by an eye-tracking study which reveals to what extent consumers succeed in purchasing the products that best meet their purchase intentions when (...) only a representative amount of misleading information is present. The study shows that decisions were suboptimal in relation to what the consumers claimed they wanted to purchase. Only in one product category did consumers in this study actually look at products that were slightly better than average, and as a result, they mainly selected products that were just as often poor as good. If the proportion of bad purchase decisions based on misleading information is small enough, perhaps it might be better to direct the authors’ attention to other ways of improving the decision environments that consumers encounter. In addition, the eye-tracking study provides some insight into how consumers sample information when making an in-store purchase decision. The present data show that consumers invested on average of less than 1 s to look at products. (shrink)