Exogenous Constraints Research Articles

“Will wait for the government pension here”: Structural factors impacting on day labourers’ access to employment in East London, South Africa

The study investigated barriers and enablers that day labourers in East London, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, experience while attempting to access temporary employment opportunities. The focus was on the constraints and enablers of the structures in East London’s local economy. The research adopted a sequential exploratory design, utilising a three-phase approach. The first phase of the study was a quantitative process to determine the socio-economic profile of the day labourers. The second and third phases were qualitative. In phase 3, semi-structured interviews were conducted with day labourers at three selected hiring sites. Political interference, lack of access to information, insufficient skills and skills accreditation, a difficult local business environment and limited access to the Extended Public Works Programme as a result of age and gender are the key endogenous and exogenous constraints and structures at play in the day labour market in East London. These structures render day labourers structurally vulnerable despite the agency and resilience displayed through their daily endeavours. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates this vulnerability vividly. It is imperative that the government revisits relevant policies to accommodate the ‘missing middle’ still on the margins and outside the catchment area of protective measures.

Institutional Order Handling and Broker-Affiliated Trading Venues

Abstract Using detailed order handling data, we find that institutional brokers who route more orders to affiliated alternative trading systems (ATSs) are associated with lower execution quality (i.e., lower fill rates and higher implementation shortfall costs). To separate clients’ preference for ATSs from brokers’ routing decisions, we confirm these results for orders where brokers have more order handling discretion, matched broker analysis that accounts for ATS usage, matched child orders that account for client intent, and based on an exogenous constraint on ATS venue choice. Our results suggest that increased transparency of order routing practices will improve execution quality.

Second‐best pricing for incomplete market segments: Application to electricity pricing

AbstractDue to technological, political, or practical considerations, most price mechanisms are not fully differentiated by time, location, and contingency of delivery. Rate or tax designers then face a trade‐off between the costs and benefits of using more complex price schedules. This paper studies the second‐best problem of designing, for a given market segment, a linear pricing schedule with a limited number of distinct prices while facing exogenous constraints within a large and practically relevant family. Interestingly, we find that second‐best prices may be computed using simple machine learning techniques. As an illustration, we apply our framework to retail electricity pricing in California.

The Gatekeepers: Executive Lawyers And The Executive Power In Comparative Constitutional Law

The growth in the power of the executive branch of government has been accompanied by a related growth – heretofore unexplored in the literature on comparative constitutional law – of the role and importance of executive legal advisors. These influential but often secretive advisors can be the first and sometimes only group to review the actions of the executive, or legislative proposals before enactment, for compliance with the constitution. In this article, we compare this practice in four similar but somewhat distinct jurisdictions – the UK, Canada, the US and Ireland – to assess its impact on constitutionalism and the executive power. We conclude that the practice of constitutional review by executive lawyers is highly variable, changing between places and over time along four key axes that can either empower or constrain the executive to varying degrees. It can restrain executive action by holding it within constitutional boundaries; it can bolster the executive power by giving legalistic credibility to its actions while providing little restraint in practice; or it can create policy distortion by overly tightly binding executive and legislative action. Constitutional advice from executive legal advisors, then, does not operate as an exogenous constraint on executive power, but can be structured and manipulated by the executive to have various different effects. As such, we argue that this institution requires much more attention from both comparative constitutional lawyers and constitutional designers to map its effects on the constitutional order and to see what structures, processes and cultural factors might shape it. Finally, we argue for increased transparency in the provision of executive constitutional advice, as without this, even understanding its effects is extremely difficult.

Executive pensions and the pay–performance relation—Evidence from changes to pension legislation in the UK

Abstract This article evaluates the role of executive pensions in the relationship between executive compensation and corporate performance. As a natural experiment, we exploit a major change to the tax-free allowances governing executive pensions. This reform affected the cost of pensions for firms whose executives had accumulated pension benefits in excess of the prescribed limit. We find a strong reaction to the reform. After 6 April 2006, many executives saw their defined benefit pension schemes replaced with risk-free cash payments. This imposition of an exogenous constraint on the contracting over CEO pay significantly decreased the relationship between executive pay and firm performance.

Expert deference as a belief revision schema

When an agent learns of an expert’s credence in a proposition about which they are an expert, the agent should defer to the expert and adopt that credence as their own. This is a popular thought about how agents ought to respond to (ideal) experts. In a Bayesian framework, it is often modelled by endowing the agent with a set of priors that achieves this result. But this model faces a number of challenges, especially when applied to non-ideal agents (who nevertheless interact with ideal experts). I outline these problems, and use them as desiderata for the development of a new model. Taking inspiration from Richard Jeffrey’s development of Jeffrey conditioning, I develop a model in which expert reports are taken as exogenous constraints on the agent’s posterior probabilities. I show how this model can handle a much wider class of expert reports (for example reports of conditional probabilities), and can be naturally extended to cover propositions for which the agent has no prior.

Under pressure. Economic constraints, electoral politics and labour market reforms in Southern Europe in the decade of the Great Recession

AbstractEven when subject to comparable exogenous constraints during the Eurozone crisis and in its immediate aftermath, governments in Southern Europe have pursued distinct labour market reform agendas. What room for manoeuvre did governments of crisis‐struck peripheral countries really have in shaping their labour market reform strategies, and how can we account for the observed variation? We address these questions by making a twofold contribution to the debate on the political economy of austerity in the Eurozone periphery. First, through the first systematic analysis of all labour market and collective bargaining (CB) reforms implemented in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece over 2009–2019, we identify those elements of core labour market deregulation common across Southern European countries (namely, the loosening of employment protection for workers on open‐ended contracts and the decentralisation of CB to the firm level); and those elements of variation, both cross‐country and cross‐party, in the content of corollary labour market interventions that accompanied this core deregulation. Second, we explain these similarities and variations in reform outcomes as the product of the interaction of two factors: economic constraints and electoral dynamics. We argue that the implementation of the common core of deregulation is linked to the exogenous pressure to improve export competitiveness to which Southern European countries have been subjected since the crisis. Through the combination of survey data analysis and qualitative evidence, we then show empirically how the variation in the corollary measures accompanying deregulation is linked to the class composition of the electoral social blocs Southern European partisan governments rely on or aim to assemble. Based on this analysis, we identify four ideal‐typical labour market reformist strategies attempted by Southern European governments during the decade of the Great Recession. The analysis highlights that although domestic politics plays a crucial role in shaping structural adjustment under crisis conditions, not all reform strategies are equally viable within the framework of Economic and Monetary Union.

When Task Constraints Delimit Movement Strategy: Implications for Isolated Joint Training in Dancers.

Athletic performance is determined by numerous variables that cannot always be controlled or modified. Due to aesthetic requirements during sports such as dance, body alignment constrains possible movement solutions. Increased power transference around the ankle-joint, coupled with lower hip-joint power, has become a preferential strategy in dancers during leaps and may be considered a dance-specific stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) demand. Newell's theoretical model of interacting constraints includes organismic (or individual), environmental, and task constraints describing the different endogenous and exogenous constraints individuals must overcome for movement and athletic performance. The unique task constraints imposed during dance will be used as a model to justify an isolated joint, single-targeted block progression training to improve physical capacity within the context of motor behavior to enhance dance-specific SSC performance. The suggested ankle-specific block progression consists of isometrics, dynamic constant external resistance, accentuated eccentrics, and plyometrics. Such programming tactics intend to collectively induce tendon remodeling, muscle hypertrophy, greater maximal strength, improved rate of force development, increased motor unit firing rates, and enhanced dynamic movement performance. The current perspective provides a dualistic approach and justification (physiological and motor behavioral) for specific strength and conditioning programming strategies. We propose implementation of a single-targeted block progression program, inspired by Newell's theoretical model of interacting constraints, may elicit positive training adaptations in a directed manner in this population. The application of Newell's theoretical model in the context of a strength and conditioning supports development of musculoskeletal properties and control and is conceptually applicable to a range of athletes.

Bilateral Risk Sharing with Heterogeneous Beliefs and Exposure Constraints

This paper studies bilateral risk sharing under no aggregate uncertainty, where one agent has Expected-Utility preferences and the other agent has Rank-Dependent Utility preferences with a general probability distortion function. We impose exogenous constraints on the risk exposure for both agents, and we allow for any type or level of belief heterogeneity. We show that Pareto-optimal risk-sharing contracts can be obtained via a constrained utility maximization under a participation constraint of the other agent. This allows us to give an explicit characterization of optimal risk-sharing contracts. In particular, we show that an optimal risk-sharing contract contains allocations that are monotone functions of the likelihood ratio, where the latter is obtained from Lebesgue's Decomposition Theorem.

BILATERAL RISK SHARING WITH HETEROGENEOUS BELIEFS AND EXPOSURE CONSTRAINTS

AbstractThis paper studies bilateral risk sharing under no aggregate uncertainty, where one agent has Expected-Utility preferences and the other agent has Rank-dependent utility preferences with a general probability distortion function. We impose exogenous constraints on the risk exposure for both agents, and we allow for any type or level of belief heterogeneity. We show that Pareto-optimal risk-sharing contracts can be obtained via a constrained utility maximization under a participation constraint of the other agent. This allows us to give an explicit characterization of optimal risk-sharing contracts. In particular, we show that an optimal risk-sharing contract contains allocations that are monotone functions of the likelihood ratio, where the latter is obtained from Lebesgue’s Decomposition Theorem.

ОБЛІКОВО-АНАЛІТИЧНЕ ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ ЕКОНОМІЧНОЇ БЕЗПЕКИ ЗАКЛАДІВ ВИЩОЇ ОСВІТИ УКРАЇНИ У КОНТЕКСТІ ТЕОРІЇ ОБМЕЖЕНЬ

The author reveals peculiarities of interpretation of the essence of economic security of higher education institutions of Ukraine and its accounting and analytical support in the conditions of reforming the market of educational services and in the context of neutralization of endogenous and exogenous restrictions.The article substantiates that at the current stage of development of the national economy of Ukraine, the importance of ensuring a high level of economic security of higher education institutions is conditioned by the increase of their financial autonomy and responsibility for their financial status, the type of financial stability, the quality of provision of educational services and the efficiency of their activities as a whole. All this puts additional demands on the top management of educational institutions to strengthen the control over the organization and implementation of accounting and analytical procedures, the implementation of the budget, the rationality of spending the state and local budgets, the special fund, earned and attracted independently. However, it also gives the freedom to choose the optimal organizational structure of a higher education institution, an educational management system to eliminate ineffective units, and to close educational programs that are not in demand among educational applicants.The specificity of the use of the theory of restrictions in activity of higher education institutions is considered. Specifically, the types of restrictions are described in detail, the system of analytical indicators for improving the educational management of educational institutions in the context of the theory of constraints is refined in order to improve their economic security. Yes, endogenous limitations include power and time constraints. The capacity limitation is caused by a mismatch between the high demand for quality education and the lack of material and technical facilities of the educational institutions, the reduction of budget funding, the lack of highly qualified and motivated scientific and teaching staff, etc. Time constraints, despite the fact that the duration and technology of providing educational services to education recipients are clearly regulated by current legislation and higher education standards, are intensified by the increasing competition between educational institutions to ensure better quality education and to gain leadership in the Ukrainian and world educational services market.Among exogenous constraints, particular attention is paid to market and demographic constraints. Yes, market constraints are related to the imbalance of labor market needs and the supply of specialties and highly qualified graduates of higher education institutions. Increasing competition between entrants of the educational institutions, the solvency of the population, high entrant’s requests for quality of education, conditions of study and living in dormitories of higher education institutions also play an important role.Demographic constraints, which are directly dependent on the number and level of knowledge of graduates of general secondary education and their desire to pursue higher education, particularly in Ukraine, and not abroad, have a significant impact on the scope of educational institutions.The relationship between the level of economic security of higher education institutions of Ukraine and the quality of management accounting and strategic analysis of their activity in the context of limiting endogenous and exogenous factors have been identified. The necessity of developing and strict adherence to the higher education institutions of Ukraine, new requirements for accounting and analytical support of economic security on the basis of reliable and relevant information base of management decisions is substantiated.The directions of increasing the economic security of higher education institutions of Ukraine by improving its accounting and analytical support in the context of constraint theory are proposed.

How Labor Market Inequality Transforms Mass Politics

AbstractWhy do left parties lose vote shares in times of economic crisis and hardship? Why do right-wing governments implement seemingly left-wing policies, such as labor market activation? Why is representation becoming more and more unequal? And why do workers vote for right-wing populist parties? Several political science theories propose meaningful and important answers to these key questions for comparative politics, focusing on identity politics, programmatic convergence of parties or exogenous constraints. However, there is an additional and distinct approach to all of the questions above, which emphasizes socio-structural transformations in the labor market: most of the processes above can be understood with reference to increasing labor market inequality and its political implications. The relevance and explanatory power of labor market inequality for mass politics have not been fully acknowledged in comparative political science and this is the reason for this symposium. Labor market inequality affects political preferences and behavior, electoral politics, representation, and government strategies. The main purpose of our symposium is to make broader comparative politics research aware of the crucial structural changes that labor markets have undergone in the advanced capitalist democracies of the OECD, and of the tremendous implications these changes have had for politics.

When the "selfish herd" becomes the "frozen herd": spatial dynamics and population persistence in a colonial seabird.

Aggregations are common in ecological systems at a range of scales and may be driven by exogenous constraints such as environmental heterogeneity and resource availability or by "self-organizing" interactions among individuals. One mechanism leading to self-organized animal aggregations is captured by Hamilton's "selfish herd" hypothesis, which suggests that aggregations may be driven by an individual's effort to minimize their risk of predation by surrounding themselves with conspecifics. We demonstrate that aggregations observed in Adélie Penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) colonies are a convolution of both self-organized dynamics and external forcing arising from landscape terrain. In fluid, highly mobile aggregations, individuals are constantly moving in response to changing environmental conditions, the locations of predators, or the movements of conspecifics. However, when the ability to rearrange is limited and spatial reconfiguration occurs on slower time scales than changes in population size, systems may become trapped in suboptimal arrangements. We use simulated annealing to demonstrate that Adélie Penguin colonies are frozen in suboptimal spatial arrangements, and employ an individual-based modeling approach to demonstrate that this suboptimal spatial configuration is driven by a convolution of nest site fidelity and stochastic events at the level of individual nests. The resulting spatial dynamics are responsible for a hysteretic response to long-term changes in abundance. We find that declining abundance leads to fragmentation even in a homogeneous environment, which has population-level consequences for reproductive success because predation is biased towards colony edges. Strong edge effects from heterogeneous predation coupled with fragmentation in response to population declines create a positive feedback cycle that can accelerate population decline. This work provides a mechanistic understanding of complex spatial structuring in penguin colonies, provides a link between current spatial patterning and past dynamics, and suggests the possibility of critical collapse in seabird populations.

Incorporating Behavioral Constraints in Online AI Systems

AI systems that learn through reward feedback about the actions they take are increasingly deployed in domains that have significant impact on our daily life. However, in many cases the online rewards should not be the only guiding criteria, as there are additional constraints and/or priorities imposed by regulations, values, preferences, or ethical principles. We detail a novel online agent that learns a set of behavioral constraints by observation and uses these learned constraints as a guide when making decisions in an online setting while still being reactive to reward feedback. To define this agent, we propose to adopt a novel extension to the classical contextual multi-armed bandit setting and we provide a new algorithm called Behavior Constrained Thompson Sampling (BCTS) that allows for online learning while obeying exogenous constraints. Our agent learns a constrained policy that implements the observed behavioral constraints demonstrated by a teacher agent, and then uses this constrained policy to guide the reward-based online exploration and exploitation. We characterize the upper bound on the expected regret of the contextual bandit algorithm that underlies our agent and provide a case study with real world data in two application domains. Our experiments show that the designed agent is able to act within the set of behavior constraints without significantly degrading its overall reward performance.

Using multi-armed bandits to learn ethical priorities for online AI systems

AI systems that learn through reward feedback about the actions they take are deployed in domains that have significant impact on our daily life. However, in many cases the online rewards should not be the only guiding criteria, as there are additional constraints and/or priorities imposed by regulations, values, preferences, or ethical principles. We detail a novel online agent that learns a set of behavioral constraints by observation and uses these learned constraints when making decisions in an online setting, while still being reactive to reward feedback. We propose a novel extension to the contextual multi-armed bandit setting and provide a new algorithm called Behavior Constrained Thompson Sampling (BCTS) that allows for online learning while obeying exogenous constraints. Our agent learns a constrained policy that implements observed behavioral constraints demonstrated by a teacher agent, and uses this constrained policy to guide its online exploration and exploitation. We characterize the upper bound on the expected regret of BCTS and provide a case study with real-world data in two application domains. Our experiments show that the designed agent is able to act within the set of behavior constraints without significantly degrading its overall reward performance.

Robustness of full revelation in multisender cheap talk

This paper studies information transmission in a two‐sender, multidimensional cheap talk setting where there are exogenous constraints on the (convex) feasible set of policies for the receiver, and where the receiver is uncertain about both the directions and the magnitudes of the senders' bias vectors. With the supports of the biases represented by cones, we prove that whenever there exists an equilibrium that fully reveals the state, there exists a robust fully revealing equilibrium (FRE), i.e., one in which small deviations result in only small punishments. We provide a geometric condition—the local deterrence condition—that relates the cones of the biases to the frontier of the policy space, which is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a FRE. We also construct a specific policy rule for the receiver—the min rule—that supports a robust FRE whenever one exists.

Category Strategy for Firm Advantage

The decision of where to position in a market is crucial to firm success. Most strategy research focuses on either choosing an attractive industry or firm-level differences that lead to sustained advantage. In both approaches, how the industry or submarket is defined is typically taken as an exogenous constraint. But firms also can shape market categories in ways that advantage the firm. In this article, I draw on research in strategy, sociology, and cognitive science to show category strategy is foundational to strategic decisions around competitive positioning. Cognitively, the market categories people use define the playing field for firms, as they partially determine competitive sets and evaluation standards. Sociologically, definitions of market categories are subject to social influence. This means strategic decisions about how to position within the market affect how market categories are defined and evolve, which firms can (and should) use to achieve long-term value.

Is There a Tradeoff between Economic Development Incentives and Economic Freedom?

State and local governments have used targeted incentives to recruit businesses for decades. The relationship between incentives and business formation, employment, and economic growth has been studied in detail. This paper extends this literature by examining the relationship between development incentives and economic freedom. Optimal tax theory assumes an exogenous government revenue constraint, suggesting that not collecting taxes from some businesses results in higher taxes on others, which may negatively impact economic freedom. By contrast, tax breaks could diffuse across firms and, thus, positively affect economic freedom. The paper investigates this relationship with state-level panel data between 1994 and 2013. We find an economically and statistically significant negative relationship between incentives and freedom, which is robust to several specifications.

Agricultural Extension: Challenges of Extension service for rural poor and youth in Amhara Region, North Western Ethiopia. The Case of North Gondar Zone

Ethiopia is one of the countries on the African continent with highest agricultural potential. Its natural resources base is the foundation of any economic development, food security and other basic necessities of its people. Predominantly smallholder agriculture is the dominant sector of the national economy. Smallholder agriculture is the dominant sector of the national economy. To boost the production and productivity of the agriculture sector; the extension systems is expected to play paramount role. However, the agricultural system is still characterized by low level of Agricultural service delivery practice that couldn’t move the existing traditional agriculture in to modern. The objective of the study is toexamine constraints in addressing women farmers and rural youth and to assess constraints of extension system in promoting agricultural technologies to farmers in the study area. Primary and Secondary data was collected for the study purpose. In addition to respondents’ interview, focus group discussion, key informants interview and case studies were used for qualitative data analysis. Descriptive statistics of mean, standard devotions and percent was applied. For statistical tests, chi-square, T-test, Pearson and spearman’s correlation coefficient were employed. As a conclusion, the challenges of existing public agricultural extension service provision institutional, technological and technical and in terms of addressing cross-cutting issues such as environment and gender as theses have wider contexts to look into existing endogenous and exogenous constraints.

Deciphering the complex architecture of an herb using micro-computed X-ray tomography, with an illustrated discussion on architectural diversity of herbs

Differing from most animals, plants have an indeterminate body plan, allowing them to add new body parts throughout their lifetime. The realized modular construction of a plant is the result of endogenous processes and exogenous constraints. Plant architectural analysis provides a holistic approach to whole-plant development by disentangling endogenous processes from exogenous constraints. Such analyses have focused more on trees than herbs. We here report a rare growth form discovered in the tropical herb Centella asiatica (Apiaceae) using micro-computed X-ray tomography to understand organogenesis in the meristem. Seeds of C. asiatica germinate to give rise to an orthotropic monochasium (sympodium) with terminal inflorescences. A stolon subsequently emerges from the oldest leaf axils of the sympodium. The primary growth of stolons is indeterminate (monopodial), and they only bear scale leaves. The stolon not only produces new leafy sympodial shoots at each node but also an axillary inflorescence. To place this growth form in context, we illustrate all architectural models so far reported from herbs. Our study highlights the complexity of herb architectures and illustrates the use of a novel methodology to decipher plant branching modes.