Les marchés financiers sont-ils rationnels ?
Due to the recent stock market crises, many economists have been keeping aloof from the « core» of financial theory, whose main contention is that stock market prices are at any moment the best possible estimate of the « true» value of the issuing firms. Most of those economists have brought forward, in a way or another, the hypothesis that markets suddenly get crazy. This contribution, based on both observa~tion of the recent financial history (the crash of the « New Economy» securities) and results from « experimental economics», and using the complementary concepts of « mimicry» and « convention » to account for « self-referential dynamics», is opening a third way of thinking the efficiency problematic: investors fix their strategy based on the estimates of the other participants, even if they strongly believe they are wrong.
La financiarisation du secteur forestier : le cas de Produits Forestiers Résolu
L’article examine le processus de financiarisation des grandes entreprises nord-americaines du secteur forestier a travers l’etude de cas d’une des plus grandes corporations en Amerique du Nord, et plus particulierement au Quebec, AbitibiBowater (Produits forestiers Resolu). Notre apport consiste a analyser le processus de la financiarisation a la fois d’un point de vue externe, par l’analyse des relations avec les analystes financiers, et d’un point de vue interne, par l’analyse du modele d’affaires de l’entreprise. Il s’agit egalement de montrer que la financiarisation est un processus global qui touche meme les activites a faible valeur ajoutee basees sur le controle du marche pour les debouches et sur le controle de la ressource pour l’approvisionnement (modele des staples). L’analyse de la financiarisation permet ainsi de repenser les liens entre l’activite industrielle et la sphere financiere.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.