Search results for "Exchange"
showing 10 items of 2035 documents
What Will You Do Next? A Cognitive Model for Understanding Others’ Intentions Based on Shared Representations
2013
Goal-directed action selection is the problem of what to do next in order to progress towards goal achievement. This problem is computationally more complex in case of joint action settings where two or more agents coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a common goal: actions performed by one agent influence the action possibilities of the other agents, and ultimately the goal achievement. While humans apparently effortlessly engage in complex joint actions, a number of questions remain to be solved to achieve similar performances in artificial agents: How agents represent and understand actions being performed by others? How this understanding influences the choice of ag…
Crossing Boundaries: Why Physics Can Help Understand Economics
2019
Socio-economic systems can often successfully be treated as complex systems in the statistical physics sense. This means that the complexity resides in the emerging dynamical behaviour, not in a complicated composition. In order to understand why physics can help to understand socio-economic phenomena with complex behaviour in this sense, I argue that it is necessary to adopt a structural perspective. Accordingly, one has to modify the notion of mechanistic explanations, partly by broadening it. One crucial tool for finding mechanistic explanations in such a structural sense, are minimal models, i.e. models that abstract from micro details in a drastic way. I will show why mechanistic expla…
The metaphorical species: Evolution, adaptation and speciation of metaphors
2015
Studying cartoons about the economic crisis and focusing on a pair of scissors as a symbol, I prove how they first turn into unambiguous metaphor for the economic crisis and then experience an evolution in order to adapt to new communication contexts. Along these processes, they undergo more complex changes such as coadaptation and speciation. This has allowed for the scissors meme as a symbol of economic cutbacks to permeate society, and for its metaphorical use to occupy many disparate communication scenarios, unlike other symbolic elements that were also used, but turned out to be less cognitively efficient and therefore offered fewer evolutionary possibilities.
Information Flows Across Wheat Futures Markets
2015
We study information flows across four wheat futures markets on four continents: Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange (ZCE), South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX), Euronext/Liffe, and Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBT). Three main approaches have been applied: cointegration techniques, VAR analysis, and a multiple regression model proposed by Peiro, Quesada, and Uriel (1998) to study information flows among non-synchronous markets. Our results indicate that no long-run links exist among the four markets, that ZCE is by far the most endogenous market, and that Euronext/Liffe is the most exogenous one. Furthermore, the model by Peiro et al. (1998) points to KCBT as the most influential as well as the…
Regulation and efficiency: the case of European railways
2001
Abstract During the long period of regulation of the railway system in Europe (1950s–1990s) the companies notably improved their levels of productivity. However, parallel to this, the state of their financial accounts also significantly worsened. In order to explain this fact we have estimated both cost and revenue frontier functions, calculating the losses associated with both cost and revenue inefficiencies as well as inefficiencies on the cost side. The results obtained show the existence of significant potential losses of revenue, which can be explained above all by the strong policy of regulation and intervention reigning in this period. A better commercial policy and a supply adapted …
Polarization and Spectacle in the Spanish Political Talk Show ‘La Sexta Noche’ During the 2019 European Elections
2021
This article analyses how in the main political talk show on television in Spain, La Sexta Noche, the main themes of the European agenda were silenced or conditioned by the themes of the national, regional and local agenda during the last European elec-tions. The media debate was oriented towards an analysis of the results of national elections and the campaign for regional and local elections that al-lowed for a greater spectacle, thanks to the shock effect of such polarized ideol-ogies and the trivialization of national politics. This research has studied all the shows of the programme broad-cast as of the national elections on 28th April 2019 up until the European elections held on 26th …
Hard currency indebtedness of the developed socialist countries
1985
In recent years the problems of the indebtedness of the communist countries have been driven somewhat into the background by the high foreign indebtedness of many developing countries and the attention attracted by the balance of payments crises in Brazil and Mexico. Yet there are many indications that the need for the socialist debtor nations to adjust their balance of payments policy has not lessened but, to a large extent, simply been deferred. It is therefore not unlikely that the 1980s will witness a new need to solve the problems of those nations and their creditors in the West.
Credit risk and efficiency in the European banking system: A three-stage analysis
2002
Increased competition and the attempts of European banks to increase their presence in other markets may have affected the efficiency and credit risk in the banking system. The first aspect is the incentive in reducing costs in order to gain in competitiveness. The second is associated with their lack of knowledge of such markets and/ or acceptance of a higher risk in order to increase their market share. Despite the importance of these aspects, banking literature has usually analysed the effects of competition on the efficiency of banking systems without considering these aspects. The few studies that attempt to obtain risk adjusted efficiency measures do not consider that part of the risk…
The Past and Future of Innovations in Microfinance
2012
The microfinance industry carries every sign of an innovation in its take-off phase. The various aspects of the microfinance innovation were developed in the 1980’s, twenty years later the industry experiences a phenomenal growth rate, and it has diffused to most developing countries in the world. This review paper looks at microfinance as an entrepreneurial activity in its own right, contributing to the development of small and medium-sized firms in developing countries. We trace the innovations in microfinance, for instance group lending, loans to women, and their financing, and we ask whether the business model implied is sustainable once diffusion has gone far, competition enters, and c…
Theoretical and Analytical Framework
2021
Analytically, the present work relies on two foundations, Anthony Downs’ (1957) Proximity model of electoral competition which states that political parties or candidates will seek to position themselves as close as possible to the (preferred) policy positions of voters and Ian Budge’s past election model (1994), according to which parties and candidates use the results of past elections in order to gain information about the electorate landscape. Both models rely on a ‘marketplace’ analogy with demand and supply. Candidates, parties, and politicians supply policies (advertised as policy positions), while the electorate, voters, and constituencies demand policies. Just like in a marketplace…