Amartya Sen addresses the question why he is disinclined to provide a fixed list of capabilities to go with his general capability approach. Capability assessment can be used for different purposes ...(varying from poverty evaluation to the assessment of human rights or of human development), and public reasoning and discussion are necessary for selecting relevant capabilities and weighing them against each other in each context. It would be a mistake to build a mausoleum for a "fixed and final" list of capabilities usable for every purpose and unaffected by the progress of understanding of the social role and importance of different capabilities. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of economic and pricing theory for resource management in the evolving fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. The 5G wireless ...networks are envisioned to overcome existing limitations of cellular networks in terms of data rate, capacity, latency, energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, coverage, reliability, and cost per information transfer. To achieve the goals, the 5G systems will adopt emerging technologies such as massive multiple-input multiple-output, mmWave communications, and dense heterogeneous networks. However, 5G involves multiple entities and stakeholders that may have different objectives, e.g., high data rate, low latency, utility maximization, and revenue/profit maximization. This poses a number of challenges to resource management designs of 5G. While the traditional solutions may neither efficient nor applicable, economic and pricing models have been recently developed and adopted as useful tools to achieve the objectives. In this paper, we review economic and pricing approaches proposed to address resource management issues in the 5G wireless networks including user association, spectrum allocation, and interference and power management. Furthermore, we present applications of economic and pricing models for wireless caching and mobile data offloading. Finally, we highlight important challenges, open issues and future research directions of applying economic and pricing models to the 5G wireless networks.
The increased awareness of the role of technology and innovation in the economy has not yet found a clear expression in orthodox economic theory—or in the growth strategies being applied across most ...of the advanced world. There are currently widely divergent opinions on the likely impact of information technologies on growth and employment. While the optimists claim that these technologies, guided by the market, will eventually bring growth, the naysayers counter with predictions of high unemployment and low growth. At the same time, a significant proportion of the environmental movement has been calling for zero growth, ‘de-growth’ or similar, essentially blaming technology for climate change and other environmental and social ills. In this chapter, I shall argue that what all of these divergent views on technology and growth share is the absence of a proper historical under-standing of innovation: of its nature, of the interactions it generates in the economy and of the regularity in the technological upheavals from which innovation has sprung since the first Industrial Revolution. Although it is difficult to find an economist today who will not accept that innovation is a key driver of economic growth, it remains almost impossible for them to express its impact adequately in orthodox models. Increases in labour productivity through the change in proportions of labour and capital do reflect process innovations, but the impact of radical product innovations can neither be expressed nor predicted. Such truly new capital goods and infrastructures as (historically) steamships, railways and computers, which cost less and less at the same time as their influence on growth and society becomes more and more powerful, are probably the most dynamic inducers of growth. The specific nature of these technologies is not easily measurable, and there are hardly any comparable statistics of such ‘game-changers’ across the past two centuries, so they are routinely ignored. Yet this oversight is a waste of one of the richest sources of knowledge about how growth comes about and how jobs are created and destroyed.
Over the last decade or so there has been an identifiable shift in the interests of many economic geographers towards a concern with practices: stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions ...that constitute and reproduce economic space, and through and within which socioeconomic actors and communities embed knowledge, organize production activities, and interpret and derive meaning from the world. Although this shift has gained significant momentum its general theoretical significance remains somewhat unclear and the concept is vulnerable to criticisms that it is incoherent, too ‘micro-scale’ in emphasis, unable to provide valid links between everyday practices and higher-order phenomena (eg, institutions, class structures), and that, in some cases, it lacks a sound political economy. This paper argues that while it undoubtedly has limitations, the practice-oriented shift represents an ongoing development of a longstanding and heterodox field of social scientific interest from both within and beyond the subdiscipline. We first highlight the diverse strands of economic geography scholarship that have an explicit interest in practices and then propose an epistemological and methodological framework for a practice-oriented economic geography. The framework is based on the polemical argument that insight from both critical realist and actor-network perspectives can provide the basis to better demarcate practices in relation to their social and spatiotemporal dimensions. It goes on to outline a reformulated retroductive methodology to assess the impacts and theoretical significance of particular economic-geographical practices. The paper concludes that practice offers a potentially powerful, yet complementary, epistemological tool that can create conceptual space for the study of a wide range of socioeconomic and geographical phenomena.
Objective: Behavioral economic theory suggests that a reduction in substance use is most likely when there is an increase in rewarding substance-free activities. The goal of this randomized ...controlled clinical trial was to evaluate the incremental efficacy of a novel behavioral economic supplement (Substance-Free Activity Session SFAS) to a standard alcohol brief motivational interviewing (BMI) session for heavy-drinking college students. Method: Participants were 82 first-year college students (50% female; 81.7% White/European American; M age = 18.5 years, SD = 0.71) who reported 2 or more past-month heavy drinking episodes. After completing a baseline assessment and an individual alcohol-focused BMI, participants were randomized to either the SFAS or to a Relaxation Training (RT) control session. The SFAS was delivered in an MI style and attempted to increase the salience of delayed academic and career rewards and the patterns of behavior leading to those rewards. Results: The combination of an alcohol BMI plus the SFAS was associated with significantly greater reductions in alcohol problems compared with an alcohol BMI plus RT at the 1-month and 6-month follow-up assessments (p = .015, ηp2 = .07), an effect that was partially mediated by increases in protective behavioral strategies. BMI + SFAS was also associated with greater reductions in heavy drinking among participants who at baseline reported low levels of substance-free reinforcement or symptoms of depression. Conclusion: These results are consistent with behavioral economic theory and suggest that a single session focused on increasing engagement in alternatives to drinking can enhance the effects of brief alcohol interventions.
In today's world, the corporate image of the largest companies is closely linked to their performance in the field of corporate social responsibility and the disclosure of information on that topic, ...specifically, on climate change. Since the Board of Directors is the body responsible for this process, the aim of this article is to show the role that companies' Boards of Directors play in the accountability process vis-à-vis stakeholders in relation to one specific aspect which has enormous significance in environmental information: practices used to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. In order to achieve this, we shall verify certain business characteristics, in addition to the size and activity of the Board of Directors, and we shall take different dependence models into consideration. These models will include variables related to the level of independence and diversity of the Board of Directors, which interact with dummy variables representing the company's litigation risks regarding environmental behavior and the institutional macro-context of the organization's country of origin. The results make it clear that Boards of Directors are basically focused on the traditional responsibility of creating economic value, instead of dealing with today's broader business world concepts, which include social responsibility. This focus, therefore, does not favor the accountability process before other stakeholders, if this makes it more difficult to protect the interests of shareholders.
The establishment of a tax code for Iraq had as much to do with politics as with economics, and many in the US who would prefer a flat-tax scheme to the progressive tax plan watched with dismay as US ...policy makers conjured a complex tax code for Iraq. For neoliberal reformers, the discursive construction of such starkly utopian destinations plays an important role in rallying the troops, bolstering convictions and aligning short-term tactics with long-term goals.
Sustainable consumption is gaining in currency as a new environmental policy objective. This paper presents new research findings from a mixed-method empirical study of a local organic food network ...to interrogate the theories of both sustainable consumption and ecological citizenship. It describes a mainstream policy model of sustainable consumption, and contrasts this with an alternative model derived from green or ‘new economics’ theories. Then the role of localised, organic food networks is discussed to locate them within the alternative model. It then tests the hypothesis that ecological citizenship is a driving force for ‘alternative’ sustainable consumption, via expression through consumer behaviour such as purchasing local organic food. The empirical study found that both the organisation and their consumers were expressing ecological citizenship values in their activities in a number of clearly identifiable ways, and that the initiative was actively promoting the growth of ecological citizenship, as well as providing a meaningful social context for its expression. Furthermore, the initiative was able to overcome the structural limitations of mainstream sustainable consumption practices. Thus, the initiative was found to be a valuable tool for practising alternative sustainable consumption. The paper concludes with a discussion of how ecological citizenship may be a powerful motivating force for sustainable consumption behaviour, and the policy and research implications of this.
В статье рассмотрена эволюция экономических школ и их идей, также проведенсравнительный анализ течений экономической мысли. В статье рассмотрены экономические теории вразрезе государственного ...регулирования сельского хозяйства в современных условиях рынка
This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in other ...disciplinary fields. Second, it reinterprets some exemplary economic sociology studies by using the relational work lens to clarify the concept’s utility for empirical analysis. Third, it speculates about the place of relational work in the theoretical toolkit of economic sociologists, in particular its relation to embeddedness. The paper concludes by arguing for the utility of the concept to integrate structural, cultural, and power-focused analyses of economic life, to highlight the often-overlooked role of emotions in economic exchange, and to ground an alternative to rational action theory in economic sociology.
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