Suchergebnisse

How do we make social democracy -- by seizing the unknown possibilities of the future, or by focussing our attention on the immediate present? Julian Wright examines French reformist and idealist socialism's fascination with modern history, using interlocking biographical essays to understand the timeframe of their social transformation.

I formalize the popular argument that retailers pay too much and cardholders too little to make use of payment card platforms, resulting in excessive use of cards. To do this, I analyze a standard two‐sided market model of a payment card platform. With minimal additional restrictions, the model implies that the privately set fee structure is unambiguously biased against retailers in favor of cardholders, a result that continues to hold even if the platform can perfectly price discriminate on both sides. The market failure arising is primarily a regulatory problem and does not raise any competition concerns.

In a recent paper, Chiara Fumagalli and Massimo Motta (2006) challenge the idea that an incumbent can foreclose efficient entry in the face of scale economies by using exclusive contracts. They claim that inefficient exclusion does not arise when buyers are homogenous firms that compete downstream. However, when upstream firms can compete in two-part tariffs, their equilibrium analysis contains some errors. Fixing these errors, inefficient exclusion arises when scale economies are sufficiently large or the entrant's cost advantage is not too big. Inefficient exclusion arises to protect industry profits from competition. (JEL L11, L13, L14)

Abstract
The revision of common assumptions about Belle Époque regionalism in France depends on a detailed study of the thought and actions of Jean Charles-Brun and his closest allies. Many of the misconceptions about French regionalism are the result of misunderstandings, not about the subtlety of Charles-Brun's political philosophy, but about the fundamental elements of the movement and, in particular, the regionalists' aims. Before elaborating those aims in more detail, this chapter examine Charles-Brun's own life and career, including his failed candidature in the 1906 legislative elections, his support of the Alliance républicaine from 1908, his engagement at a philosophical level with the federalism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, or his complicated relationship with the Christian democratic movement in the 1890s. The personal qualities of Charles-Brun which made the greatest impression on the Fédération Régionaliste Française were his irony and his belief in reconciliation.