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On 13 July 1974, President Nixon signed a proclamation declaring the week of 20 July National Space Week, in honor of man's landing on the moon on 20 July 1969. Although the lunar landing was certainly the emotional high point for the American space program, interest in space remains quite high, as evidenced by the tremendous popularity of films and books on the subject. The intention of this article is to provide readers with a guide to materials that serve to focus attention on space exploration, not only during Space Week, but throughout the year.

In this article, we consider the nonparametric identification of Markov dynamic games models in which each firm has its own unobserved state variable, which is persistent over time. This class of models includes most models in the Ericson and Pakes (1995) and Pakes and McGuire (1994) framework. We provide conditions under which the joint Markov equilibrium process of the firms’ observed and unobserved variables can be nonparametrically identified from data. For stationary continuous action games, we show that only three observations of the observed component are required to identify the equilibrium Markov process of the dynamic game. When agents’ choice variables are discrete, but the unobserved state variables are continuous, four observations are required.

We propose a simple model consisting of two separated markets: the market for good y and the market for good x. Purchasing information about consumer behavior in the former market helps the monopolist firm, in the latter market, to price-discriminate. Consumers differ in their income and in their level of myopia. Personal data market regulation could both increase consumers' awareness about the treatment of their data and allow them to have their data erased from the data holder. We find that the former aspect of the policy reduces the number of transactions, and hence tends to reduce total surplus, while the second typically boosts willingness to pay of consumers and has positive effects on surplus, provided that the share of high-income consumers is not too high. The overall effect of regulation on total welfare depends on the share of high-income and myopic consumers.

The authors characterize the conditions under which a country may eventually split and when it splits within an infinite horizon multi-stage differential game.

In contrast to the existing literature, the authors do not assume that after splitting, players will adopt Markovian strategies. Instead, the authors assume that while the splitting country plays Markovian, the remaining coalition remains committed to the collective control of pollution and plays open-loop.

Within a full linear-quadratic model, the authors characterize the optimal strategies. The authors later compare with the outcomes of the case where the splitting country and the remaining coalition play both Markovian. The authors highlight several interesting results in terms of the implications for long-term pollution levels and the duration of coalitions under heterogenous strategies as compared to Markovian behavior.

In this paper, the authors have illustrated the richness of the simplications of enlarging the set of strategies in terms of the emergence of coalitions, their duration and the implied welfare levels per player. Varying only three parameters (the technological gap, pollution damage and coalition payoff share distribution across players), the authors have been able to generate, among other findings, quite different rankings of welfare per player depending on whether the remaining coalitions after split play Markovian or stay precommited to the pre-splitting period decisions.

On June 27,1950 President Truman ordered American air and naval forces to South Korea to provide support in that country's defense against the North Koreans. By June 30 U.S. ground forces had entered the battle. On July 7 the United Nations agreed to send troops to S. Korea, the UN's first armed response to aggression. General Douglas MacArthur was named commander of both the troops of the United States and the United Nations. Three years later, July 27, 1953, an armistice agreement was signed and the Korean War drew to a close.

The relevance of present consumption bias on personal finance has been confirmed in several studies and has important theoretical and practical implications. It has important, measurable implications when analyzing commitment or self-control, adherence to healthy habits (e.g. exercising or dieting), procrastination tendencies or savings. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of these issues by postulating a model of income uncertainty within a hyperbolic discounting framework that measures the cost of financial intertemporal inconsistencies related to this bias. The emphasis is on the analysis of this cost. We also propose experimental designs and consistent estimation methods, as well as agent-based modelling extensions.

The authors develop a finite-horizon model with hyperbolic preferences. Individuals have a present bias distinct from their discount rate so their choices face intertemporal inconsistencies. The authors further extend the analysis with uncertainty about future incomes. Specifically, individuals live for three periods, and the authors find the optimal consumption levels in the perfect-information benchmark by backward induction. They then proceed to add biases and uncertainty to characterize their implications and measure the costs of the intertemporal inconsistencies they cause.

The authors measure how an agent's utility is greater when they “tie their hands” than when they are free to re-evaluate and change their consumption schedule. This “cost of being vulnerable to falling into temptation” only depends (increasingly) on the measure of the present bias and (decreasingly) on the discount factor. They analyze the varying effects on utility and consumption of changes in impatience and optimism. They conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications; they also propose agent-based simulations, as well as empirical and experimental designs, to further test the relevance and applications of the results.

This model has important, measurable implications when analyzing commitment or self-control, adherence to healthy habits (e.g. exercising or dieting), procrastination tendencies or savings.

The results enhance the estimation of the costs of present biases such that employers can better identify the incentives required to acquire and retain human capital. The authors provide evidence that workers are vulnerable to contract renegotiations and about the need for a regulator that restores ex-ante efficiency. Similarly, in the private sector, firms could recognize the postulated consumer profiles and focus their resources on anxious, too-optimistic or potentially addictive consumers; this, again, provides some justification about the need for a regulator.

In traditional exponential discounting, the marginal rate of substitution of consumption between two points depends only on their distance; thus, it allows none of the intertemporal inconsistencies we often observe in real life. Therefore, hyperbolic discounting better fits the data. The authors model choice under uncertainty and focus on the costs caused when present biases (ex-post) push behaviour away from ex-ante optimality. They conclude by proposing experimental designs to further enhance the estimation and implications of these costs. The postulated refinements have the potential to improve previous analyses on commitment devices and commitment-related regulation.

The materials included in this column were selected on the basis of an item by item review of all government publications received at a major depository library. Emphasis is placed on tools of a reference format, although much else that the Federal government publishes is otherwise of high referral value. Publications not in a reference format, in the strictest sense, are included when their potential value dictates; brief entries for “how to” items and informative pamphlets are also given if deemed potentially useful, particularly for school and public libraries and wherever the identification of vertical file materials is the responsibility of the public service librarian. Documents librarian's shorthand has been used in the bibliographical citations. Wherever possible, “United States” has been understood rather than stated in the corporate entries; also, the GPO imprint and place have been dropped. All items unless otherwise indicated are available from the Superintendent of Documents at the prices given. Prices which do not appear were not available at the date of review.

A poor performance of the cold supply chain (CSC) may increase the loss of quality and potency of perishables and temperature-sensitive products that deteriorate the financial and environmental aspects of the same. The purpose of the current research work is to identify the critical performance factors (criteria) and their co-factors (sub-criteria) that are responsible for the performance measurement of CSC and suggest the best possible solutions (alternatives) to improve the same.

To achieve the objective of the research, a hierarchical model has been developed and analyzed using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)-Fuzzy TOPSIS as a hybrid approach to obtain the severity weights of the identified criteria and prioritization toward their relative importance for the best possible alternatives.

Analysis reveals that the criteria “energy consumption” comes out to be the most critical criteria, and alternative “application of passive cold devices” is the most effective solution for improving the performance of CSC. Higher energy consumption leads to a higher rate of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increasing the global warming phenomenon, high operational cost and degradation of natural energy resources. The Application of Passive Cold Devices (PCDs) utilizes solar energy to operate the refrigeration units reducing the energy consumption, environmental and operating cost of CSC.

The research work provides several insights into the critical issues related to the CSC and suggests significant findings that enable the management and decision-makers to adopt these practices for performance evaluation and improvement of the same. The key findings of the work, such as “application of passive cold devices” and “application of IoT in cold chain logistics”, facilitate an improved platform to improve the CSC performance and proposed several directions that will enhance the merit of future research.

The presented study consolidates the various perspectives associated with CSC performance, explores the most critical criteria and proposes the best suitable cold chain practices for organizational growth. The work also provides an analytical analysis with the essence of practicalities and sensitivity analysis to support the robustness of the results. By enriching the literature and quantitative analysis of the new proposed model, this paper forms vast managerial and research implications in the field of CSC.

In this paper, the authors study the effect of consumers' fairness preferences on dynamic pricing strategies adopted by platforms in a non-cooperative game.

This study applies fair game and repeated game theory.

This study reveals that, in a one-shot game, if consumers have fairness preferences, dynamic prices will slightly decline. In a repeated game, dynamic prices will be reduced even when consumers do not have fairness preferences. When fairness preferences and repeated game are considered simultaneously, dynamic prices are most likely to be set at fair prices. The authors also discuss the effect of platforms' discounting factors, the consumers' income and alternative choices of consumption on the dynamic prices.

The study findings illustrate the importance of incorporating behavioral elements in understanding and designing the dynamic pricing strategies for platforms and the implications on social welfare in general.

The authors developed a theoretical model to incorporate consumers' fairness preference into the decision-making process of platforms when they design the dynamic pricing strategies.

When large currents flow near steel plates in large electric machines, the eddy current loss produced in the plates causes local overheating. Therefore, not only the total loss but also the loss distribution should be analyzed accurately. The local loss distribution, however, has not been fully analyzed yet.