Abstract This article examines the artistic potential of forms image-making that involve registering features real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over resultant “automatic images,” which in turn limits work, and form as a whole. I argue this is true only if understood mean agent produces work by their own bod...

Firms undertake a variety of actions to reduce risk through diversification, including entering diverse lines of business, taking on project partners, and maintaining portfolios of risky projects such as R&D or natural resource exploration. By a well-known argument, securities holders do not directly benefit from risk-reducing corporate diversification when they can replicate this diversificati...

We study an infinite-horizon Lucas tree model where a manager is hired to tend to the trees and is compensated with a fraction of the trees’ output. The manager trades shares with investors and makes an effort that determines the distribution of the output. When the manager is less risk-averse than the investors, managerial trading smoothes output and results in a less volatile stock price and ...

Once the acidic gases have been emitted to the atmosphere they can be transported over large distances. Hydrogen chloride is highly soluble and is deposited close to source areas, whereas sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are relatively insoluble (at atmospheric concentrations) and are therefore usually transported much further from the source before being deposited. For example, around 90% o...

Daniel Wegner argues that conscious will is an illusion. I examine the adequacy of his theory of apparent mental causation and whether, if accurate, it suggests that our experience of agency and authorship should be considered illusory. I examine various interpretations of this claim and raise problems for each interpretation. I also distinguish between the experiences of agency and authorship.

Reproduction partielle permise avec citation du document source, incluant la notice ©. Short sections may be quoted without explicit permission, if full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Ce document est publié dans l'intention de rendre accessibles les résultats préliminaires de la recherche effectuée au CIRANO, afin de susciter des échanges et des suggestions. Les idées et le...

1. The problem of perceptual self-location We perceive things in the external world as spatially located both with respect to each other and to ourselves, such that they are in principle accessible from where we seem to be. I hear the door bang behind me; I feel the pen on the desk over to my right; and I see you walking beneath the line of pictures, from left to right in front of me. By displa...

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organism...

We propose a new business cycle theory. Firms need to randomize over firing or keeping workers who have performed poorly in the past, in order to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Firms have an incentive to coordinate the outcome of their randomizations, as coordination allows them to load the firing probability on states of the world in which it is costlier for workers to become ...

The present paper introduces a principal-agent model in which the principal pays wages that exceed agents’ resevations values, and agents voluntarily comply with his directives even though no formal mechanisms exist to enforce these directives. We view the agency relationship as a reciprocal exchange where the principal pays rents to reduce the probability of a collective challenge. These rents...