Professor Vernon L. Smith is a major creator of the new discipline of experimental economics. This collection of his papers from 1962 to 1990 surveys key developments in the field from early attempts to study economic behaviour in now classic double oral auction markets through recent studies of industrial organization and decision making. Topics covered include monopoly and oligopoly, supply and demand theory under posted pricing, uniform pricing, double continuous auction, and sealed bid-offer auctions; hypothetical valuation and market pricing; (...) asset price bubbles; predatory pricing; market contestability and natural monopoly; and the methodology of experimental economics. Taken together, the papers form a history of the study of economics under controlled conditions. (shrink)

Examines independent documentary film production in India within a political context.

The periodic table can be simply demarcated into four classes of metal and four classes of nonmetal. Such a treatment has been obstructed by the traditional view of metalloids as in-between elements; understandable but needless boundary squabbles; and a group-by-group view of the reactive nonmetals. Setting aside these limiting notions reveals some interesting patterns and facilitates teaching and learning the periodic table.

This new translation of The Upanishads is at once delightfully simple and rigorously learned, providing today's readers with an accurate, accessible rendering of the core work of ancient Indian philosophy. The Upanishads are often considered the most important literature from ancient India. Yet many academic translators fail to capture the work's philosophical and spiritual subtlety, while others convey its poetry at the cost of literal meaning. This new translation by Vernon Katz and Thomas Egenes fills the need for an (...) Upanishads that is clear, simple, and insightful - yet remains faithful to the original Sanskrit. As Western Sanskrit scholars who have spent their lives immersed in meditative practice, Katz and Egenes offer a unique perspective in penetrating the depths of Eastern wisdom and expressing these insights in modern yet poetic language. Their historical introduction is suited to newcomers and experienced readers alike, providing the perfect entry to this unparalleled work. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended in-person public education across the United States, a critical infrastructure of care that parents—especially mothers—depend on to work. To understand the nature and magnitude of school closures across states, we collected detailed primary data—the Elementary School Operating Status database —to measure the percentage of school districts offering in-person, remote, and hybrid instruction models for elementary schools by state in September 2020. We link these data to the Current Population Survey to evaluate the association between school (...) reopening and parents’ labor force participation rates, comparing 2020 labor force participation rates to those observed prepandemic in 2019. We find that, across states, the maternal labor force participation rate fell to a greater extent than that of fathers. In 2019, mothers’ rate of labor force participation was about 18 percentage points lower than fathers’. By 2020, this gap grew by 5 percentage points in states where schools offered primarily remote instruction. We show that schools are a vital source of care for young children, and that without in-person instruction, mothers have been sidelined from the labor force. The longer these conditions remain in place, the more difficult it may be for mothers to fully recover from prolonged spells of nonemployment, resulting in reduced occupational opportunities and lifetime earnings. (shrink)

This book takes us far beyond the usual focus of comparative law with analysis of a broad range of jurisdictions, including mixtures of common and civil law, and also those mixing Islamic and/or traditional legal systems with those derived from common and/or civil law traditions. The discussion is situated within the broader context of the continuing tides of globalization, the emergence of Islamic governments in some parts of the Middle East, the calls for a legal status for Islamic law in (...) some European countries, and the increasing focus on traditional and customary norms of governance in post-colonial contexts. (shrink)

In the fall of 1957 the University of California Press expanded Arnheim’s 1933 book _Film_ by four essays and brought that landmark work back into print as _Film as Art._ Now nearly fifty years after that re-edition, the book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early limitations: no sound, no color, no three-dimensional (...) depth. (shrink)

Mark Vernon links the resources of the philosophical tradition with numerous illustrations from modern culture to ask what friendship is and how it relates to sex, work, politics and spirituality. Unusually, he argues that Plato and Nietzsche, as much as Aristotle and Aelred, should be put center stage. Their penetrating and occasionally tough insights are invaluable if friendship is to be a full, not merely sentimental, way of life for today.

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget (1856-1935). She is known mostly for her supernatural fiction. She also wrote essays and poetry. She contributed to The Yellow Book and was a follower of Walter Pater. Her literary works explored the themes of haunting and possession. She was responsible for introducing the concept of empathy into the English language. Empathy was a key concept in Lee's psychological aesthetics which she developed on the basis of prior work (...) by Theodor Lipps. Her response to aesthetics interpreted art as a mental and corporeal experience. This was a significant contribution to the philosophy of art which has been largely neglected. Additionally she wrote, along with her friend and colleague Henry James, critically about the relationship between the writer and his/her audience pioneering the concept of criticism and expanding the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience's (or her personal) response. She was a strong proponent of the Aesthetic movement. Among her famous works are: A Phantom Lover (1890), Hauntings (1890) and Art and Life (1896). (shrink)

In the original publication of the article, the author has identified four belated corrections which are listed below.

The particular fascination of butterfly wings for developmental biologists (and others) lies in their spectacular array of colour patterns. The evolutionary and developmental relationships between these patterns have been analysed and we know something of the cell interactions involved in their formation(1). Now butterfly homologues of Drosophila wing‐patterning genes have been identified, and their expression patterns offer the first clues to the molecular mechanisms which specify wing colour patterns(2).

This book examines the relations among work, education and leadership in philosophical and practical perspective. Among the topics included are the concepts of education and training, the nature of vocational education, the relations of art and utility in schooling, and the roles of leadership in education and work. This book draws together influences from the American Pragmatist, John Dewey, and the British Idealist R. G. Collingwood.

While neo-classical analysis works well for studying impersonal exchange in markets, it fails to explain why people conduct themselves the way they do in their personal relationships with family, neighbors, and friends. In Humanomics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L. Smith and his long-time co-author Bart J. Wilson bring their study of economics full circle by returning to the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith. Sometime in the last 250 years, economists lost sight of the full range of human feeling, (...) thinking, and knowing in everyday life. Smith and Wilson show how Adam Smith's model of sociality can re-humanize twenty-first century economics by undergirding it with sentiments, fellow feeling, and a sense of propriety - the stuff of which human relationships are built. Integrating insights from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations into contemporary empirical analysis, this book shapes economic betterment as a science of human beings. (shrink)

Originally published during the early part of the twentieth century, the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature were designed to provide concise introductions to a broad range of topics. They were written by experts for the general reader and combined a comprehensive approach to knowledge with an emphasis on accessibility. This 1913 volume by Vernon Lee explores the philosophical significance of the concepts of beauty and aesthetic preference, written in terms intended to be intelligible to the lay reader.

A rich collection of critical essays, authored by philosophers and practicing artists, examining Deleuze and Guattari's engagement with a broad range of art forms.

Abstract:In this essay we provide a brief account and interpretation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments showing that it departs fundamentally from contemporary patterns of thought in economics that are believed to govern individual behavior in small groups, and contains strong testable propositions governing the expression of that behavior. We also state a formal representation of the model for individual choice of action, apply the propositions to the prediction of actions in trust games, report two experiments testing these predictions, and (...) interpret the results in terms directly related to the model. In short, we argue that the system of sociability developed by Adam Smith provides a coherent non-utilitarian model that is consistent with the pattern of results in trust games, and leads to testable new predictions, some of which we test. (shrink)

This book examines the meaning of some of the most basic terms we use in both confessional and secular discussion about morality and religion. Is there any credible and distinctive meaning in what we refer to as "right and wrong" and "God"? What do we even mean by meaning itself? Outside specialist academic discourse these terms are rarely examined in depth. Here they are probed with as much rigor as possible, but also accessibly. Literary, philosophical, and theological sources are all (...) widely drawn on in the discussion. Experiences of ordinary life help illustrate the issue and arguments at stake. As a collection of essays each section is freestanding. But there is also a clear overall connecting argument. It demonstrates a common trajectory towards "ultimacy" or "transcendence" in the meaning of these terms. It argues that the meaning of morality, of God, and of meaning itself, is not just an individual or social construction. It is grounded in what lies beyond us. In this way it offers an alternative to reductionist views, and advances a thesis about transcendence which connects across a wide range of both religious and non-religious experience. (shrink)

The principal findings of experimental economics are that impersonal exchange in markets converges in repeated interaction to the equilibrium states implied by economic theory, under information conditions far weaker than specified in the theory. In personal, social, and economic exchange, as studied in two-person games, cooperation exceeds the prediction of traditional game theory. This book relates these two findings to field studies and applications and integrates them with the main themes of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the thoughts of F. (...) A. Hayek. (shrink)

Originally published during the early part of the twentieth century, the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature were designed to provide concise introductions to a broad range of topics. They were written by experts for the general reader and combined a comprehensive approach to knowledge with an emphasis on accessibility. This 1913 volume by Vernon Lee explores the philosophical significance of the concepts of beauty and aesthetic preference, written in terms intended to be intelligible to the lay reader.

In this article, we investigate how state-to-state differences in U.S. childcare costs and gender norms are associated with maternal employment. Although an abundance of research has examined factors that influence mothers’ employment, few studies explore the interrelationship between maternal employment and culture, policy, and individual resources across U.S. states. Using a representative sample of women in the 2017 American Community Survey along with state-level measures of childcare costs and gender norms, we examine the relationship between these state conditions and mothers’ (...) probability of employment. We pay careful attention to differences in mothers’ level of education. Our results suggest that expensive childcare is associated with lower maternal employment, particularly for those with less education. For the college educated, expensive childcare is negatively associated with maternal employment in states with traditional gender norms that uphold mothers as primary caregivers. Among mothers with lower levels of education, gender norms have a limited association with employment. These findings suggest that highly educated mothers mobilize resources to remain in the labor force when paid work is supported by local gender norms. For less-educated mothers, expensive childcare predicts lower employment regardless of gender norms, indicating that structural constraints outweigh normative expectations among those with fewer resources. (shrink)