WORKSHOP IN POLITICAL THEORY    AND POLICY ANALYSIS    Recent Fall 1996 Colloquia     http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/colloquia/materials/fall1996_colloquia.html

Colloquia during Fall 1996:

Professor Thomas P. Lyon, School of Business, Indiana University, will bethe guest speaker. His presentation is entitled "Industrial Policy and Regional Innovation Networks: A Proposed Empirical Analysis of Italy."

December 2, 1996

Professor Richard Steinberg, Department of Economics, Public Affairs, and Philanthropic Studies, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, will be the guest speaker on Monday, December 2, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Rationing by Nonprofit Organizations with Distributional Objectives: An Exploratory Survey."

November 18, 1996

Professor Renee Smith, Department of Political Science, Rochester University, Rochester, NY, will be guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, November 18, 1996. Her presentation is entitled "Campaigning, Governing, and the Emergence of the Modern Presidency."

November 11, 1996

Professor Eric Rasmusen, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, Indiana University School of Business, will be the guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, N ovember 11, 1996. His presentation is entitled "The Economics of Desecration: Flag Burning and Related Activities."

November 4, 1996

Professor Ronald M. Harstad, Department of Economics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, will be the guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium On Monday, November 4, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Experimental Methods and Elicitation of Values."

October 28, 1996

Professor Mark Sproule-Jones, V.K. Copps Professor in Urban Studies, Department of Political Science, Mcmaster University, Ontairo, Canada, Will be the guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, October 28, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Restoring the Great Lakes?"

October 21, 1996

Professor Rejean Landry, Department of Political Science, Laval University, Quebec, Canada, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, October 21, 1996. His presentation is entitled "A Framework for the Study of Incomplete Institutions."

October 14, 1996

Professor Toshio Yamagishi, Department of Behavioral Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, October 14, 1996. His presentation is entitled "In-group Favoritism and Culture of Collectivism."

October 7, 1996

Professor Axel Ostmann, University of Saarland, Saarbrucken, Germany will be the guest speaker. His presentation is entitled "How Members of a Common Deal with Inspection and Overcrop."

September 30, 1996

Dr. Arun Agrawal, visiting scholar, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, September 30, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Community: Tracing the Outlines of a Seductive Concept."

September 23, 1996

Professor Peter Orebech, the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, University of Tromso, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, September 23, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Giving Value to the Public Property Rights: Might Principle of Restoration Help?"

September 16, 1996

Professor Gunther H. Englehardt, Institute of Public Finance, University of Hamburg, Germany, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, September 16, 1996. His presentation is entitled "'Symbiotic Arrangements' in Metropolitan Government Third-Sector Interaction."

Professors Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, Co-directors, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, will chair a roundtable session for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, September 9, 1996.

The Roundtable session will be an opportunity for our colleagues on campus, visiting scholars, and students to become acquainted with the research projects currently being pursued at the Workshop. After the brief discussion of the Workshop research, colleagues will be asked to introduce themselves and to briefly discuss their current work.

December 9, 1996

Professor Thomas P. Lyon, School of Business, Indiana University, will bethe guest speaker. His presentation is entitled "Industrial Policy and Regional Innovation Networks: A Proposed Empirical Analysis of Italy."An abstract is provided below. There will not be a paper for this session.

Abstract

Governments throughout Europe are increasingly of the view that innovation is central to the competitiveness of their economies. In support of this valued objective, governments are trying to create a competitive edge for themselves by building a regional innovation infrastructure through which local firms have easy and affordable access to a wide array of technical services. Italy is a particularly interesting case in point. It is widely recognized that innovation in Italy occurs with two very different types of settings: 1) a network of small- and medium-sized firms, and 2) what is sometimes called the "core R&D; system." The first of these has been characterized as engaged in rapid adoption of technology generated externally and in the adaptation and continuous improvement of this technology while the core R&D; system is thought not to perform satisfactorily in terms of innovation.

The question of what makes regional innovation networks effective remains incompletely explored. One stream of academic research focuses on the spillovers of information that can occur between firms located near one another, thereby creating agglomeration economies. A second hypothesis, particularly attractive to policy makers, is that well-executed industrial policy has been responsible for regional success stories. For example, Italy has established over 40 centers to support the diffusion of new technology in particular industries through experimental research, the provision of information and training, pilot projects, and consultant services. A third hypothesis is that a crucial factor contributing to the success of regional networks is the presence of general "social capital" (e.g., norms of reciprocity, trust) that has developed historically in certain regions. For example, the central regions of Italy have a millennium of experience with democratic self-governance that may facilitate network forms of interaction, both public and private, even today. This type of capital is very slow to accumulate or depreciate, and is difficult for government policy to affect.

The purpose of the proposed research is to evaluate empirically the importance of these alternative hypotheses about the innovative performance of localized industries, using Italy as a test case. Innovative performance is typically measured by patenting activity, by the actual number of innovations created by firms, by the speed with which innovations diffuse through an industry, or by reductions in production costs over time. Patenting data is collected at the regional level in Italy, and is available through the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. Because the other measure of innovation are difficult to obtain, I propose to research strategy and the independent variables needed to test the three hypotheses mentioned above. I hope to be able to ascertain, at least in a rough way, the empirical effects of government policy on the innovativeness of regional networks of firms. These findings should be of considerable interest as policy makers continue to ponder the best ways to improve the functioning of regional innovation networks.

December 2, 1996

Professor Richard Steinberg, Department of Economics, Public Affairs, and Philanthropic Studies, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, will be the guest speaker on Monday, December 2, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Rationing by Nonprofit Organizations with Distributional Objectives: An Exploratory Survey." An abstract of his paper is provided below.

The growing commercial activities of nonprofit charities, hospitals, educational institutions, arts organizations, day-care centers, nursing homes, and religious organizations has led many to question the legitimacy of the nonprofit designation and the concomitant tax and commercial activity, it is easy to regard them as simply for-profits-in-disguise. However, there are many varieties of commercial activity. This paper explores whether there are testable differences between these sectors in the ways in which commercial activity is conducted through an exploration of allocation mechanisms.

How are organizational outputs allocated among potential consumers? For-profit firms use the price as the primary allocation mechanism: a price is posted, those willing and able to pay the price receive the good or service, and the price is bid up to the point where there are no potential consumers willing to pay the price but unable to purchase the product. Nonprofit organizations also use prices, perhaps in a different fashion. Organizations in either sector also employ a variety of more complicated pricing schemes (sliding-scale fees and other forms of price discrimination, multi-part tariffs with separate admission and usage charges, non-linear prices with caps and deductibles) and non-price allocation mechanisms (waiting lists, competitive application or other eligibility requirement, quality dilution, and lotteries).

In either sector, these mechanisms play multiple roles: revenue acquisition, pie dividers, determination of the characteristics of consumers (screening), risk allocation, incentive for consumers to economize (moral hazard, demand smoothing), incentive for consumers to engage in complementary activities, signaling of trustworthiness of providers, signaling of consumer demands. Nonprofits potentially differ from for-profits in the importance placed on these various functions and side-effects of allocation mechanisms, and this leads to differences in predicted allocation behavior.

November 18, 1996

Professor Renee Smith, Department of Political Science, Rochester University, Rochester, NY, will be guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, November 18, 1996. Her presentation is entitled "Campaigning, Governing, and the Emergence of the Modern Presidency."

Political scientists examining linkages between campaigning and governing have primarily focused on the connection between changes in political parties and the emergence of candidate-centered campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s and on the shift by presidents to direct appeals to the mass public. Electoral changes at least as profound as those changes for campaign styles or for the relationship between campaigning and governing. Building on previous work in which we showed that the modern presidential practice of addressing policy appeals directly to public audiences emerged at the start of the 20th century with the Theodore Roosevelt presidency, we contend that the emergence of new governing strategies in the early 1900s were the consequence of new campaign styles. The rise of candidate-centered elections in the 1890s and 1900s laid the foundations for the modern presidential practice of addressing policy appeals directly to the public. Our evidence drawn from numerous secondary sources and from a sample of "New York Times" newspaper dates during presidential campaigns between 1876 and 1928 shows that changes in campaign strategies did indeed precede changes in governing strategies, suggesting that the two are causally related. We argue that three main factors--the adoption of the Australian ballot, the rise of the independent press, and the shift from local, spectacle-oriented campaigns to national educational campaigns--created the new campaign environment.

November 11, 1996

Professor Eric Rasmusen, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, Indiana University School of Business, will be the guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, N ovember 11, 1996. His presentation is entitled "The Economics of Desecration: Flag Burning and Related Activities."

When a symbol is desecrated, the desecrator obtains benefits while those who venerate the symbol incur costs. This paper asks whether the benefits are likely to exceed the costs. I conclude they do not. Desecration is often motivated by a desire to reduce the utility of others, which generally is inefficient. Also, if desecration occurs, people have less incentive to create and maintain symbols, which, like other produced goods, need property-rights protection. Laws against desecration are especially useful given the likely failure of the Coase Theorem and the escape valve of efficient law-breaking. It is not even clear whether desecration laws have a net negative effect on the amount of free expression, given the incentive they provide for symbol creation, the possibility of citizens' substitution into other forms of expression, and the possibility of government substitution into other forms of speech suppression.

November 4, 1996

Professor Ronald M. Harstad, Department of Economics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, will be the guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium On Monday, November 4, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Experimental Methods and Elicitation of Values."

Experimental methods are currently being used extensively to elicit subjective values for commodities and projects. Three methodological problems are not addressed in this emerging literature. The first is the potential for laboratory responses to be censored by field opportunities; the second is the potential for subjective perceptions about field opportunities, and hence responses, to be affected by the institution used to elicit values; and the third is the potential for some elicitation institutions to influence subjective perceptions of characteristics of the commodity or project being valued. All three problems result in potential loss of control over the value elicitation process.

I also move beyond this particular paper in the direction of a survey paper. Glenn Harrison, Lisa Rutstrum and I are writing on Contingent Valuation (CV). I talk about how CV yields hypothetical bias. How trying to determine the extent of that bias in the lab calls for more careful designs that have been used, but how it is in principle possible to calibrate a CV by running lab experiments with a small subset of the CV respondents. I try to go over several heated debates about CV in an impartial way.

October 28, 1996

Professor Mark Sproule-Jones, V.K. Copps Professor in Urban Studies, Department of Political Science, Mcmaster University, Ontairo, Canada, Will be the guest speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, October 28, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Restoring the Great Lakes?" An abstract of his paper is provided below.

This is a work-in-progress seminar, in which I report on a research project designed to understand recent attempts to restore the Great Lakes Basin ecosystems. Since 1985, 43 so-called Areas of Concern (AOC), where there has been substantial impairment of beneficial uses, have formulated and implemented Remedial Action Plans. Each AOC has adopted differing institutional arrangements, under the broad guidelines of the International Joint Commission, to involve multiple stakeholders in an ecosystem management approach. My study attempts to explain the relative performance of these differing institutional arrangements. A book-length monograph seems to be the most appropriate publication mode, and a draft introductory chapter is available for scrutiny prior to the seminar.

The seminar itself will focus on some key theoretical issues, working out of the CPR tradition of analysis pioneered by the Workshop among others. Two critical variables distinguish the AOCs from other research sites: size and multiple uses. An attempt will be made to suggest ways to understand and evaluate institutional arrangements for larger-scale multiple-use common pools.

October 21, 1996

Professor Rejean Landry, Department of Political Science, Laval University, Quebec, Canada, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, October 21, 1996. His presentation is entitled "A Framework for the Study of Incomplete Institutions." An Abstract of his paper is provided below.

Research programs on institutions can be differentiated according to their assumptions regarding the attributes of individuals and the nature of decision-making situations. Macro-institutional analysis tackles institutions at a very high level of aggregation while focusing on the production of detailed adhoc descriptions and taxonomies. Micro-institutional analysis of complete institutions considers stylized institutions as exogenous factors at a highly abstract level. The inductive approach to micro-analysis of incomplete institutions provides generic types of formal rules that can be used to add assumption to deductive rational choice models.

The micro-analysis of incomplete institutions endogenizes the micro-institutional arrangements defining decision-making situations by using various conceptual tools from the economic theory of transaction costs, the economic theory of contracts, as well as principal agent theory. Although these models provide more appropriate tools for capturing the institutional complexities of decision-making situations, they have lost some of the predictive ability that characterizes the theory of games.

Although the micro-analysis of incomplete institutions develops a theory of individual choices, this is not its primary intent. Indeed, its purpose is to aggregate individual choices in order to derive implications at the macro level. The relevance of the micro-analysis of incomplete institutions is related to its capacity to derive implications that explain and predict differences between contracts and structures (sets of contracts).

The contract theory of incomplete institutions proves the most promising basis presently available for the development of a general approach to the analysis of institutions.

October 14, 1996

Professor Toshio Yamagishi, Department of Behavioral Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, October 14, 1996. His presentation is entitled "In-group Favoritism and Culture of Collectivism."

In this paper, I present an argument that the culture of collectivism that characterizes Japanese society is to be conceived in terms of an equilibrium between socio-relational and cognitive traits in which people have acquired expectations for generalized reciprocity within, not across, group boundaries. Maintenance of harmony among group members and voluntary cooperation toward group goals -- the characteristics of collectivist culture -- are often considered to be fundamentally psychological in nature. It is usually considered that members of a collectivist culture like to maintain harmony and cooperate toward group goals, or the "culture" sneaks into the mind of people and drives them to behave in such a manner. According to this view, culture is a fundamentally psychological or subjective matter. This is the view that I want to challenge in this paper.

October 7, 1996

Professor Axel Ostmann, University of Saarland, Saarbrucken, Germany will be the guest speaker. His presentation is entitled "How Members of a Common Deal with Inspection and Overcrop."

A usual common consists of a common property resource and members interacting and managing the resource. The dynamics of the resource depends on its natural growth and the concrete acts of appropriation by the members. It is well known that in the standard case, the resource is endangered to be overexploited if the members of the common behave but self-interested. Nevertheless, both experiments and field research prove that members may succeed in stabilizing the common by cooperating sufficiently. Different institutional means are used for the stabilization task. In our experiments and analyses, we focus at use limitations combined with inspection. We observed a very poor performance of the institution and stable oscillation patterns. An attempt is made to explain what cognitions and social-cognitions may have shaped the observed behavioral patterns.

September 30, 1996

Dr. Arun Agrawal, visiting scholar, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, September 30, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Community: Tracing the Outlines of a Seductive Concept." An abstract of his paper is provided below.

The ghost of the traditional community may only have hovered over Comte's sociology; it has descended to occupy the center of the stage in current writings on development, environmental conservation, resource management, and democratization. Disillusionment with decades of intrusive resource management strategies and planned development have forced a recognition of the possibility that community may form a critical hinge in meeting desired social goals. No longer is community, then, the refuge within which tradition lurks to trip progressive social trends. Instead, vague and disputed as its referents are, community has become the focus of thinking on devolution of power, meaningful participation, and cultural autonomy. This paper traces the outlines of our current seduction by the concept of community. It seeks to further two arguments. One, I draw parallels among the normative assessments of community at different historical junctures. I specifically focus on scholarly views about community at the turn of the 19th century, in the middle of the 20th century, and today and point to what might account for our attraction and indifference to community. Second, this paper focuses on two different sets of characteristics that the notion of community evokes: community as shared understandings and action orientations; and community as a form of social organization. I use the disjunction in these meanings to examine the extent to which community can serve a productive task in furthering development, environmental conservation, and democratic consolidation.

September 23, 1996

Professor Peter Orebech, the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, University of Tromso, will be the speaker for the Workshop Colloquium on Monday, September 23, 1996. His presentation is entitled "Giving Value to the Public Property Rights: Might Principle of Restoration Help?" An abstract of his paper is provided below.

I would like to address the question of whether public or private measures are the most fruitful instrument for managing common pool resources and achieving sustainable societies. I am responding to those opposing my proposal of using marked mechanism as the main tool. Before entering the advantages of an enlarged market mechanism, let me explain the role of two central ingredients, the private property rights and the private markets, and also the disadvantage of exclusive public-management decisions for the purpose of achieving environmental and sustainable societies goals. I start with the latter question.

My contribution is interdisciplinary, laying particular stress on legal and social science. As governmental decision process is subject to serious management barriers, the exit of political resource distribution control is my point of departure. Having documented its inability to cope with the problem of sustainability, I turn to the Market Distribution Mechanism as the appropriate instrument. As market arrangements suffer from institutional weakness and failures, the problem then is to develop a strategy of integrating the full social cost of mismanagement of resources and pollution into all private costs. Or in strict legal terms; how to protect the legal position of Public Property Rights, relating to open access resources, the use of "the mother nature?" What is the conditions for making self-governing conservation regimes work?

Scientifical disagreement on the issue of the "tragedy of the commons," might be written on the account of confusion of ideas as authors using the notion of common property rights seems to think of "open-access regimes," i.e. Public Property Rights. For the sake of deeper understanding it is important to develop one single international unilateral and harmonized set of legal notions. The old Roman legal institutions might be applicable. In Roman legal terms, I am discussing the legal situation of Res extra commercicum (inalienable objects not having a market nor a market value), Res nullius (wild animals, fish in the ocean, jewelry and unoccupied land), Res communes omnium (objects excluded from the ownership of any human being, such as the earth, the oceans, light and air, that is the res usus inexhausti (the inexhaustible values) and the Jus inoxia utilitars; the innocent right of using.

Having chosen the Market Distribution Mechanism as sustainable development strategy, we have to look up whether this system is potent of avoiding heavy problems, which usually destroys open access regimes, such as "the Coase theorem," "the free-rider," "the game of hold out," "the prisoners dilemma," etc. How to cope with these barriers without missing the of sustainable management?

Probably the Market Mechanism Strategy might have fallacious consequences if the framework is not carefully considered. In my opinion, such a strategy is dependent upon whether open access resources do have market value, and consequently whether Public Property Rights enjoy legal protection. Being so, I look into the legal argument, which mainly have fallacious consequences to the legal protection of Public Property Rights, such as the thesis of "the detrimental competition argument," "pure economic loss," "loss incurred by third party," "lack of economic value" and "the floodgate argument." Do such conditions suspended any intruders liability for loss of Public Property Rights?

The answers being no, I finally, look into the special conditions for the legal protection of Public Property Rights. Possessors of such rights do not enjoy legal protection in general. One basic condition is that destructive multiple, conflicting use of "the commons" (open access resources) must exceed the common freedom of action. Another condition is that the "owner" of a Public Property Right, who intentionally enjoy legal protection, has actually been exploiting the open access resource.

All these conditions being fulfilled, Public Property Rights must be taken into consideration when deciding upon matters influencing on environment and resources utilization, i.e. to bring the possessors of Public Property Rights into bilateral negotiations. Threats against Public Property Rights utilization might be negotiated, bilaterally decided upon according to the best western covenantal tradition. Such processes might bring legitimate individual solutions without the problems of unanimity. Ignoring the covenant obligation, owners of Public Property Rights might claim compensation or retrieving possession of the Public Property Rights being damaged in court.

By the means of Public Property Rights legal protection, all decisions affecting the environment and resources, would have to take the "externalities" into account. I have reason to believe that the potential of incurring heavy court liability might create a climate of careful private considerations, taking Public Property Rights into account. This might create the System of Market Distribution, the very best instrument for achieving the goal of sustainable development.

September 16, 1996

Professor Gunther H. Englehardt, Institute of Public Finance, University of Hamburg, Germany. His presentation is entitled "'Symbiotic Arrangements' in Metropolitan Government Third-Sector Interaction." An abstract of his paper is provided below.

"Symbiotic Arrangements" is an abduction from the biological term "symbiosis," denominating long-term ("life-long") cooperation between (groups of) individuals of different species for their mutual benefit. According to the pragmatist philosopher of science C. S. Peirce, "abduction," in addition to "induction" and "reduction," is a third major cognitive principle. It appears to be relevant above all in the creative context of developing new paradigms, rather than perpetuating and refining traditional propositions in the context of "normal science" (T. S. Kuhn). Whereas symbiotic arrangements in ecological systems evolve and stabilize by means of natural selection, in socio-economic life they have to prove advantageous in the light of a long-term cost- benefit calculus by the prospective partners of a (production, consumption, and/or distribution) coalition on the basis of (more or less) voluntary interaction. Nevertheless, the metaphor or "symbiosis" is nowadays broadly utilized in new institutional and industrial economics. For "symbiotic arrangements," also termed "strategic alliances" or "networks," even between "for profit" enterprises, otherwise remaining independent, are becoming more and more prevalent in a variety of "hybrid organizations" and on a world-wide scale. In industrial economics the core criteria, by which the relative superiority or comparative advantages in effectiveness and efficiency of symbiotic as opposed to (spot) market and hierarchical relations appear most evident. Are considered to be (1) asset specificity, (2) information and communication technology, (3) uncertainty, (4) barriers to entry, and (5) synergy (i.e.: resource, viz.: production, consumption, and/or distribution interdependencies). Due to indeterminate quality standards and ubiquitous agency relations in collective choice settings, the criteria for effective and efficient public goods provision are far from well defined. Nevertheless, it looks and is exemplified in this paper, as if "symbiotic arrangements" in providing public, particularly metropolitan, goods and services are becoming more and more prevalent these days. They do so, above all, in policy areas that are most heavily affected by fiscal austerity strategies, i.e., freiwillige Selbstverwaltungsaufgaben (tasks of voluntary self- government) in the official German local public administration terminology. And they prevail in regions that are most severely affected by long-term unemployment, due to structural deficiencies and obsolete industries, in Germany particularly in the former German Democratic Republic. The present paper, notwithstanding the undetermined effectiveness and efficiency issues in providing (metropolitan) public goods and services, therefore undertakes to utilize the principle of "abduction" on two levels, namely by transferring the metaphor of "symbiosis" from ecological to economic life and analysis, respectively, and by "kidnapping" it from the private (industrial) to the public realm of socio-economic reality and scrutiny. Though far from providing well established empirical evidence, a number of propositions and preliminary observations, utilizing the above-mentioned institutional economic criteria, are discussed, concerning various fields and aspects of public-private sector interaction with respect job mediation, in Germany until recently a public monopoly of a PGO, called Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit (Federal Agency of Labor and Employment), and various institutional arrangements of so-called "employment plus" associations. These semi-private and public organizations strive for synergy by developing and amalgamating joint programs in the overlap of local (metropolitan) employment, welfare, and cultural policies. The intention, to repeat the argument, of our analytical effort here is not to prove the relative superiority of one versus other organizational devices in the policy fields at stake. Our aim is rather to thereby initiate networking activities for comparative policy analysis between scholars and practitioners of different academic disciplines, policy fields, and cultural backgrounds, thus, helping to understand and cope with the problems of socio- economic systems transition and transformation that may well prove critical for the viability of democratic governance in our (post) industrial welfare and increasingly multicultural metropolitan societies.