A point‐input,point‐output forest as a microprototype for capital accounting

The point‐input, point‐output, plantation forest was first studied by Martin Faustmann in the mid‐19th century. The exploitation of a Faustmannian forest involves decisions concerning investments and receipts over time that are qualitatively different from the smooth, convex flows that are usually studied in the economics of accounting. The simple, well understood analysis of the forest has implications for the concept of income in forestry as well as in other industries that are typified by nonconvex decisions. A forest is a salient example of the importance of discrete, irreversible investment, and of the role of price effects (capital gains) in income accounting and, more fundamentally, of perceptions of the “right prices” in economic analysis.     

基于前景理论的区域绿色经济发展水平多指标评价

针对绿色经济发展水平评价指标存在模糊性、异质性等问题,提出一种规范化信息,并运用前景理论进行多指标评价的方法。首先,构建区域绿色经济发展水平评价指标体系。其次,规范化异质信息,并计算待比较方案的前景函数。然后,通过定义前景值排序与专家决策偏好的一致性和不一致性程度,建立决策优化模型,计算各方案的前景值,进行方案排序和优选。最后,以三明市县域绿色经济发展水平评价为例,说明该方法的有效性、合理性和实用性。     

Prisoner's dilemma and clusters on small‐world networks

The structure of interaction plays an important role in the outcome of evolutionary games. This study investigates the evolution of stochastic strategies of the prisoner's dilemma played on structures ranging from lattices to small world networks. Strategies and payoffs are analyzed as a function of the network characteristics of the node they are playing on. Nodes with lattice‐like neighborhoods tend to perform better than the nodes modified during the rewiring process of the construction of the small‐world network. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 12:22–36, 2006     

关于城市出租车规划的模型及应用

运用增长率法,建立指数增长的模型,结合规划期的人口规模,预测规划期的居民出行量和居民出行强度,以及乘坐出租车人口,随后利用出租车空载率为主要参数,建立数学模型并预测出租车的最佳数量.利用经济学分析方法,用埃奇沃思盒式图描述交易双方的福利变化,建立均衡时的价格竞争模型,寻求使司机和乘客达到帕累托改进的可能性.分别就油价调整前后的情况,找出调整起租基价和综合单位里程车价能使双方都满意的次优方案.进一步分析了起租基价和里程的合理性,提出了数据采集的建议和方案,并向市公用事业管理部门概括介绍.模型对确定其他类似准公共产品的供应量和定价也具有一定的借鉴意义.     

Stochastic production frontiers and panel data: A latent variable framework

This paper deals with the issue of estimating production frontier and measuring efficiency from a panel data set. First, it proposes an alternate method for the estimation of a production frontier on a short panel data set. The method is based on the so-called mean-and-covariance structure analysis which is closely related to the generalized method of moments. One advantage of the method is that it allows us to investigate the presence of correlations between individual effects and exogenous variables without the requirement of some available instruments uncorrelated with the individual effects as in instrumental variable estimation. Another advantage is that the method is well suited to a panel data set with a short number of periods. Second, the paper considers the question of recovering individual efficiency levels from the estimates obtained from the mean-and-covariance structure analysis. Since individual effects are here viewed as latent variables, they can be estimated as factor scores, i.e., weighted sums of the observed variables. We illustrate the proposed methods with the estimation of a stochastic production frontier on a short panel data of French fruit growers.     

The evolution of catalytic function

It is very likely that the main driving force of enzyme evolution is the requirement to improve catalytic and regulatory efficiency which results from the intrinsic performance as well as from the spatial and functional organization of enzymes in living cells.Kinetic co-operativity may occur in simple monomeric proteins if they display “slow” conformational transitions, at the cost of catalytic efficiency. Oligomeric enzymes on the other hand can be both efficient and co-operative. We speculate that the main reason for the emergence of co-operative oligomeric enzymes is the need for catalysts that are both cooperative and efficient. As it is not useful for an enzyme to respond to a change of substrate concentration in a complex kinetic way, the emergence of symmetry has its probable origin in a requirement for “functional simplicity”.In a living cell, enzyme are associated with other macromolecules and membranes. The fine tuning of their activity may also be reached through mutations of the microenvironment. Our hypothesis is that these mutations are related to the vectorial transport of molecules, to achieve the hysteresis loops of enzyme reactions generated by the coupling of reaction and diffusion, through the co-operativity brought about by electric interactions between a charged substrate and a membrane, and last but not least, through oscillations. As the physical origins of these effects are very simple and do not require complex molecular devices, it is very likely that the functional advantage generated by the spatial and functional organization of enzyme molecules within the cell have appeared in prebiotic catalysis or very early during the primeval stages of biological evolution.We shall began this paper by presenting the nature of the probable earliest catalysts in the RNA world.     

Coleman–de Luccia Instanton of the Second Order in a Brane World

The second order Coleman–de Luccia instanton and its action in the Randall–Sundrum type II model are investigated and the comparison with the results in Einstein’s general relativity is done in the present paper. PACS Numbers: 98.80.Cq.     

Random sampling within the framework of a multivariate principal-agent approach

In this paper, we analyze a specific class of principal-agent models which seems to be sufficiently general to cover applications in environmental economics with upstream-downstream problems as an example. In our basic model, the observation outcome is ann-dimensional random vectorx and only the first and second moments ofx are common knowledge. We study the effects of random sampling in the presence of costly signals. For this purpose, we assume that the principal and the agent use a simple statistical procedure, i.e. their contract will be based on the mean of a random sample with sampling costs dependent on the sample size. It is shown that there exists an optimal sample size. We investigate the relationship between the optimal sample size, the marginal sampling costs, and the agent's risk aversion.     

基于产业聚集的城镇化发展战略研究--对安徽省地级城市发展的思考

本文运用2000年至2003安徽省17个城市的统计资料，运用比较分析法和回归分析法，从城市规模、产业聚集、要素聚集以及综合经济实力等方面，对安徽省17个地级城市的发展进行了分析。主要结论认为，近几年来安徽省城市化发展步伐加快，城市规模、产业聚集与城市综合经济实力三者关系密不可分。但安徽省在城市化过程中存在着城市空间规模外延式扩张多，注重城市内涵效益的发展不够的问题，而城市发展的首要任务是产业的发展，带动要素的聚集，进而促进城市化水平的提高。安徽省城市发展的关键是建立有利于城市化发展的聚集机制和政策环境。     

Brane World Corrections to Newton’s Law

We discuss possible variations of the effective gravitational constant with length scale, predicted by most of alternative theories of gravity and unified models of physical interactions. After giving a brief general exposition, we review in more detail the predicted corrections to Newton’s law of gravity in diverse brane world models. We consider various configurations in 5 dimensions (flat, de Sitter and AdS branes in Einstein and Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet theories, with and without induced gravity and possible incomplete graviton localization), 5D multi-brane systems and some models in higher dimensions. A common feature of all models considered is the existence of corrections to Newton’s law at small radii comparable with the bulk characteristic length: at such radii, gravity on the brane becomes effectively multidimensional. Many models contain superlight perturbation modes, which modify gravity at large scale and may be important for astrophysics and cosmology.