供应链视角下的增值税改革影响研究

构建了一个制造商和一个零售商所组成的两级供应链模型,研究增值税税率下调对供应链决策和社会福利的影响.结果表明,下调制造商、零售商增值税税率都会使产品零售价降低,提高零售商和制造商的利润.下调增值税税率给制造商带来的利润增量大于给零售商带来的利润增量.制造商税率下调导致批发价降低,零售商税率下调反而提高批发价.社会福利的变化趋势与潜在需求规模有关.当潜在需求规模较高时,社会福利总是随降税幅度的增大而增大,且税率降低后的社会福利大于税率降低前;当潜在需求规模中等时,社会福利随降税幅度的增大而减小,但税率降低后的社会福利仍大于税率降低前;当潜在需求规模较小时,社会福利随降税幅度的增大而减小,增值税税率下调损害了社会福利.     

Collective Strategy Condensation: When Envy Splits Societies

Human societies are characterized by three constituent features, besides others. (A) Options, as for jobs and societal positions, differ with respect to their associated monetary and non-monetary payoffs. (B) Competition leads to reduced payoffs when individuals compete for the same option as others. (C) People care about how they are doing relatively to others. The latter trait—the propensity to compare one’s own success with that of others—expresses itself as envy. It is shown that the combination of (A)–(C) leads to spontaneous class stratification. Societies of agents split endogenously into two social classes, an upper and a lower class, when envy becomes relevant. A comprehensive analysis of the Nash equilibria characterizing a basic reference game is presented. Class separation is due to the condensation of the strategies of lower-class agents, which play an identical mixed strategy. Upper-class agents do not condense, following individualist pure strategies. The model and results are size-consistent, holding for arbitrary large numbers of agents and options. Analytic results are confirmed by extensive numerical simulations. An analogy to interacting confined classical particles is discussed.     

Academic maturity of students in an extended programme in mathematics

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the students who are registered in the University of Pretoria’s academic development programme, named the Four-year Programme (FYP). The programme was introduced as a gateway for students who are underprepared but have the potential to succeed and then continue their studies into the mainstream science programmes. Our research focuses on measuring the change in the academic maturity of these students. In the theoretical framework that we developed, academic maturity is subdivided into two components namely non-subject based maturity and subject based maturity (mathematical maturity). This paper focuses on measuring non-subject based academic maturity. The survey used for this purpose is called the Student Academic Readiness Survey (STARS), taken at the beginning of the year and after the first semester respectively. The results of the surveys are compared to measure the change in students’ views. Results show that in all constructs there is a surprising decline in students’ perceptions regarding their own abilities over the first semester at university. We use the Dunning–Kruger effect to explain this unexpected decline, in that students seem to develop a more realistic view of their own maturity, which in itself can be seen as a growth in academic maturity.     

政府奖励对报废汽车回收模式选择的作用机制研究——基于企业社会责任视角

随着我国报废汽车数量的增多,由其造成的交通隐患、环境污染和资源浪费已成为重要社会问题,而如何设计合理可行的回收模式成为解决问题的关键。以制造商主导为前提,提出了基于企业社会责任的报废汽车回收模型,构建了制造商回收、销售商回收和第三方回收模式下的回收流程和数学模型,通过实例对考虑和不考虑企业社会责任两种情况下的回收模型进行了分析,探讨了不同政府奖励下报废汽车回收模式的策略选择。通过研究发现:(1)不论是否考虑企业社会责任,随着政府奖励的增加,制造商最终都会选择由自己进行回收;(2)当考虑企业社会责任时,政府奖励和决策者经济责任偏好都会导致决策的改变,随着政府奖励和赋予经济责任权重的同步增加,制造商的决策由第三方企业回收模式或销售商回收模式变成了制造商回收模式,表明政府奖励和企业社会责任对报废汽车回收模式选择具有显著影响。     

基于FDI收益分成视角的FTA网络演化

本文假定双边自由贸易协定(bilateral free trade agreement,简称FTA)包含着无限制对外直接投资(foreign direct investment,简称FDI),并且通过FDI销售到非FTA伙伴国的收益按照一定比例在母国和东道国之间进行分配。基于Goyal和Joshi^[1],本文构建了FTA网络形成博弈模型。本文发现,FTA网络演化过程分为两个阶段:第一阶段,从空FTA网络到星状FTA网络,存在一条路径使得个体国家福利、世界总福利均改善,在此过程中,国家福利存在不对称性;第二阶段,从星状FTA网络到全连接FTA网络,存在一条路径使得个体国家福利改善,在此过程中,世界总福利不变,国家福利不对称性逐步消除。     

Order-Stability in Complex Biological,Social, and AI-Systems from Quantum Information Theory

This paper is our attempt, on the basis of physical theory, to bring more clarification on the question “What is life?” formulated in the well-known book of Schrödinger in 1944. According to Schrödinger, the main distinguishing feature of a biosystem’s functioning is the ability to preserve its order structure or, in mathematical terms, to prevent increasing of entropy. However, Schrödinger’s analysis shows that the classical theory is not able to adequately describe the order-stability in a biosystem. Schrödinger also appealed to the ambiguous notion of negative entropy. We apply quantum theory. As is well-known, behaviour of the quantum von Neumann entropy crucially differs from behaviour of classical entropy. We consider a complex biosystem S composed of many subsystems, say proteins, cells, or neural networks in the brain, that is, S=(Si). We study the following problem: whether the compound system S can maintain “global order” in the situation of an increase of local disorder and if S can preserve the low entropy while other Si increase their entropies (may be essentially). We show that the entropy of a system as a whole can be constant, while the entropies of its parts rising. For classical systems, this is impossible, because the entropy of S cannot be less than the entropy of its subsystem Si. And if a subsystems’s entropy increases, then a system’s entropy should also increase, by at least the same amount. However, within the quantum information theory, the answer is positive. The significant role is played by the entanglement of a subsystems’ states. In the absence of entanglement, the increasing of local disorder implies an increasing disorder in the compound system S (as in the classical regime). In this note, we proceed within a quantum-like approach to mathematical modeling of information processing by biosystems—respecting the quantum laws need not be based on genuine quantum physical processes in biosystems. Recently, such modeling found numerous applications in molecular biology, genetics, evolution theory, cognition, psychology and decision making. The quantum-like model of order stability can be applied not only in biology, but also in social science and artificial intelligence.     

Experimental study on age and gender differences in microscopic movement characteristics of students

Campus security has aroused many concerns from the whole society. Stampede is one of the most frequent and influential accidents in campus. Studies on pedestrian dynamics especially focusing on students are essential for campus security, which are helpful to improve facility design and emergency evacuation strategy. In this paper, primary and middle school students were recruited to participate in the single-file experiments. The microscopic movement characteristics,including walking speed, headway, gait characteristics(step length, step frequency and swaying amplitude) and their relations were investigated. Age and gender differences in the headway-speed diagram and space requirements were analyzed by statistical tests. The results indicated that the impacts of age and gender were significant. There were three stages for the influence of gender on the headway-speed diagram for both age groups. The impacts on students' space requirements were consistent for different age and gender groups. But the impacts of age and gender on free-flow speed were affected by each other. Due to the connection of walking speed and gait characteristics, the comparisons of gait characteristics between different ages and genders were performed to understand the corresponding differences in speed more deeply. The results showed that differences in step length and swaying amplitude between males and females were significant for both age groups. The effect of gender on step frequency was significant for primary students. But for middle school students,whether gender had significant impact on step frequency was not clear here because of the large P-value. Besides, the influence of age on gait characteristics changed with gender.     

The Economics of Social Stratification in Premodern Societies

We present a microeconomic model of social stratification, which includes an endogenous fertility component. In the model, egalitarian and stratified societies coexist. The latter are divided into 2 hereditary classes: a warrior elite and a productive class. The model entails that the extra cost warriors must incur to train and equip their children for war determines the relative sizes of both classes and the degree of economic inequality. Higher costs of warrior children imply a greater economic advantage for warriors and a smaller ratio of warriors to producers. These results are consistent with the historical evidence. Finally, we explore conditions under which the social contributions of the warrior elite could discourage a revolution.     

Compressing strongly connected subgroups in social networks: An entropy-based approach

To detect and study cohesive subgroups of actors is a main objective in social network analysis. What are the respective relations inside such groups and what separates them from the outside. Entropy-based analysis of network structures is an up-and-coming approach. It turns out to be a powerful instrument to detect certain forms of cohesive subgroups and to compress them to superactors without loss of information about their embeddedness in the net: Compressing strongly connected subgroups leaves the whole net’s and the (super-)actors’ information theoretical indices unchanged; i.e., such compression is information-invariant. The actual article relates on the reduction of networks with hundreds of actors. All entropy-based calculations are realized in an expert system shell.     

Forecasting the integration of immigrants

In this research, we develop and introduce a theoretical and mathematical forecasting framework of immigrant integration using immigrant density as a single driver. First, we introduce the integration concepts we aim at forecasting. Thereafter, we introduce a theoretical and mathematical model of the relationship between integration and immigrant density. Based on this model, we develop a methodological forecasting framework. We test the framework using immigrant integration data from Spain. We produce the forecasts, and conduct the proper evaluation of them. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion of the wider implications of our results.