The incentives that durability offers to a monopolist to price discriminate over time and the related difficulties that secondhand markets create in these situations have been well recognized in the economics literature. The conventional problem for the monopolist is that, having sold a durable good, there is an incentive to reduce price later to bring into the market those consumers who would ...

The role of banking and nance in the Golden Age of European growth (1950-1973) is very little known and widely underestimated. This paper studies the French system of economic planning and investment-based strategy that enhanced medium and long term nancing (called 'invest-ment credit'). First, I describe the new institutions that were built after WWII to organize credit allocation and especial...

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Agents situated in dynamic environments bene t from having a repertoire of plans, supplied in advance, that permit them to rapidly generate appropriate sequences of actions in response to important events. When agents can form teams, new problems emerge regarding the representation and execution of joint actions. In this paper we introduce a language for representing joint plans for teams of ag...

Low density suburban development and excessive use of automobiles are associated with serious urban and environmental problems. These problems include traffic congestion, longer commuting times, high automobile dependency, air and water pollution, and increased depletion of natural resources. Master planned development suggests itself as a possible palliative for the ills of low density and hig...

The Issues4Life Foundation, for example, is a faith-based organization that targets and works with African-American leaders toward achieving the goal of “zero African-American lives lost to abortion or biotechnology.” In April, Issues4Life wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus to denounce Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and its “racist and eugenic goals.”The group blamed PPFA ...

To evaluate multidrug-resistant strains of Salmonella enterica serotype Typhimurium, including definitive type 104 (DT104) in the United States, we reviewed data from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS). In 1997 to 1998, 703 (25%) of 2,767 serotyped Salmonella isolates received at NARMS were S. Typhimurium; antimicrobial susceptibility testing and phage typing were c...

BACKGROUND One of the most difficult aspects of conducting clinical research is the ability to successfully recruit participants. Pediatric clinical research presents unique recruitment challenges that relate to the need for parental consent on behalf of a minor, child assent, and school attendance. Yet, this has been less well studied. We conducted a survey of investigators performing human su...