Assessing the efficacy of structural merger remedies:choosing between theories of harm?

Previous empirical assessments of the effectiveness of structural merger remedies have focused mainly on the subsequent viability of the divested assets. Here, we take a different approach by examining how competitive are the market structures which result from the divestments. We employ a tightly specified sample of markets in which the European Commission (EC) has imposed structural merger remedies. It has two key features: (i) it includes all mergers in which the EC appears to have seriously considered, simultaneously, the possibility of collective dominance, as well as single dominance; (ii) in a previous paper, for the same sample, we estimated a model which proved very successful in predicting the Commission’s merger decisions, in terms of the market shares of the leading firms. The former allows us to explore the choices between alternative theories of harm, and the latter provides a yardstick for evaluating whether markets are competitive or not – at least in the eyes of the Commission. Running the hypothetical post-remedy market shares through the model, we can predict whether the EC would have judged the markets concerned to be competitive, had they been the result of a merger rather than a remedy. We find that a significant proportion were not competitive in this sense. One explanation is that the EC has simply been inconsistent – using different criteria for assessing remedies from those for assessing the mergers in the first place. However, a more sympathetic – and in our opinion, more likely – explanation is that the Commission is severely constrained by the pre-merger market structures in many markets. We show that, typically, divestment remedies return the market to the same structure as existed before the proposed merger. Indeed, one can argue that any competition authority should never do more than this. Crucially, however, we find that this pre-merger structure is often itself not competitive. We also observe an analogous picture in a number of markets where the Commission chose not to intervene: while the post-merger structure was not competitive, nor was the pre-merger structure. In those cases, however, the Commission preferred the former to the latter. In effect, in both scenarios, the EC was faced with a no-win decision. This immediately raises a follow-up question: why did the EC intervene for some, but not for others – given that in all these cases, some sort of anticompetitive structure would prevail? We show that, in this sample at least, the answer is often tied to the prospective rank of the merged firm post-merger. In particular, in those markets where the merged firm would not be the largest post-merger, we find a reluctance to intervene even where the resulting market structure is likely to be conducive to collective dominance. We explain this by a willingness to tolerate an outcome which may be conducive to tacit collusion if the alternative is the possibility of an enhanced position of single dominance by the market leader. Finally, because the sample is confined to cases brought under the ‘old’ EC Merger Regulation, we go on to consider how, if at all, these conclusions require qualification following the 2004 revisions, which, amongst other things, made interventions for non-coordinated behaviour possible without requiring that the merged firm be a dominant market leader. Our main conclusions here are that the Commission appears to have been less inclined to intervene in general, but particularly for Collective Dominance (or ‘coordinated effects’ as it is now known in Europe as well as the US.) Moreover, perhaps contrary to expectation, where the merged firm is #2, the Commission has to date rarely made a unilateral effects decision and never made a coordinated effects decision.

Unravelling the theories of pre-eclampsia:Are the protective pathways the new paradigm?

Pre-eclampsia is a vascular disorder of pregnancy where anti-angiogenic factors, systemic inflammation and oxidative stress predominate, but none can claim to cause pre-eclampsia. This review provides an alternative to the 'two-stage model' of pre-eclampsia in which abnormal spiral arteries modification leads to placental hypoxia, oxidative stress and aberrant maternal systemic inflammation. Very high maternal soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFlt-1 also known as sVEGFR) and very low placenta growth factor (PlGF) are unique to pre-eclampsia; however, abnormal spiral arteries and excessive inflammation are also prevalent in other placental disorders. Metaphorically speaking, pregnancy can be viewed as a car with an accelerator and brakes, where inflammation, oxidative stress and an imbalance in the angiogenic milieu act as the 'accelerator'. The 'braking system' includes the protective pathways of haem oxygenase 1 (also referred as Hmox1 or HO-1) and cystathionine-γ-lyase (also known as CSE or Cth), which generate carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen sulphide (H2S) respectively. The failure in these pathways (brakes) results in the pregnancy going out of control and the system crashing. Put simply, pre-eclampsia is an accelerator-brake defect disorder. CO and H2S hold great promise because of their unique ability to suppress the anti-angiogenic factors sFlt-1 and soluble endoglin as well as to promote PlGF and endothelial NOS activity. The key to finding a cure lies in the identification of cheap, safe and effective drugs that induce the braking system to keep the pregnancy vehicle on track past the finishing line.

Közjó és demokrácia. Két közgazdaságtani elmélet a demokráciáról (Common good and democracy. Two economic theories of democracy)

A tanulmány a demokrácia két közgazdaságtani elméletét mutatja be. A demokrácia klasszikus elmélete a közjó fogalmára épült: a klasszikus politikai filozófia érvelése szerint a demokrácia intézménye a közjó megvalósulásának eszköze. Schumpeter bírálta a klasszikus elméletet: a közgazdasági szemléletet alkalmazva a közjó értelmezésére leválasztotta a demokráciáról a közjó fogalmát. Schumpeter szerint a demokrácia szubsztantív felfogása nem tartható, ezért ehelyett a demokrácia procedurális értelmezését kínálta fel. Az alkotmányos közgazdaságtan nem fogadja el sem a közjó és demokrácia fogalmainak elválasztását, sem a közjó szubsztantív értelmezését, ehelyett a közjónak és a demokráciának egyaránt procedurális értelmezését javasolja. _____ This essay deals with two economic theories of democracy. The classical doctrine of democracy was built on the concept of the common good, classical political philosophy arguing that the institution of democracy was the instrument for realizing the common good. This theory was criticized by Schumpeter, who applied the method of modern economics to analysis of the concept, which he separated from democracy, arguing that the substantive concept of democracy was untenable, and proposing to replace it with the procedural concept of democracy. Constitutional economics does not accept such separation of the concepts of democracy and the common good, but it does not accept the substantive interpretation of the common good either. Rather, it proposes a procedural concept of both the common good and of democracy.

Prospects for probabilistic theories of natural information

Peer reviewed

Restorative Justice and Political Forgiveness: A Comparative Study of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

This research project involves a comparative, cross-national study of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) in countries around the world that have used these extra-judicial institutions to pursue justice and promote national reconciliation during periods of democratic transition or following a civil conflict marked by intense violence and severe human rights abuses. An important objective of truth and reconciliation commissions involves instituting measures to address serious human rights abuses that have occurred as a result of discrimination, ethnocentrism and racism. In recent years, rather than solely utilizing traditional methods of conflict resolution and criminal prosecution, transitional governments have established truth and reconciliation commissions as part of efforts to foster psychological, social and political healing.

The primary objective of this research project is to determine why there has been a proliferation of truth and reconciliation commissions around the world in recent decades, and assess whether the perceived effectiveness of these commissions is real and substantial. In this work, using a multi-method approach that involves quantitative and qualitative analysis, I consider the institutional design and structural composition of truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as the roles that these commissions play in the democratic transformation of nations with a history of civil conflict and human rights violations.

In addition to a focus on institutional design of truth and reconciliation commissions, I use a group identity framework that is grounded in social identity theory to examine the historical background and sociopolitical context in which truth commissions have been adopted in countries around the world. This group identity framework serves as an invaluable lens through which questions related to truth and reconciliation commissions and other transitional justice mechanisms can be explored. I also present a unique theoretical framework, the reconciliatory democratization paradigm, that is especially useful for examining the complex interactions between the various political elements that directly affect the processes of democratic consolidation and reconciliation in countries in which truth and reconciliation commissions have been established. Finally, I tackle the question of whether successor regimes that institute truth and reconciliation commissions can effectively address the human rights violations that occurred in the past, and prevent the recurrence of these abuses.

British Romantic Criticism and the Fine Arts: A Study in Philosophical Theories of Literary Unity

This dissertation is an exploration of how a small but important group of Romantic critics, finding fault in the ideal of three unities developed by neoclassical Academicians and wrongly attributed to Aristotle, turned to the terminology and practices of the fine arts to emphasize their conception of organic unity in literature. The Romantic analogy to painting in particular enables a philosophical criticism of literature to present the aesthetic semblance of painting, the comprehension of a multitude of details in a harmonious whole that is a natural unity to its medium, as a paradigm of modern-romantic poetry and its aspirations to similar complexity, particularity, and imaginative colour. Further, in extension of the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes of the seventeenth century, the division of ancient and romantic art by Romantic critics like August Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt not only establishes an ethnological and historical difference between the artistic productions of these two cultural periods but also allows, unlike the neoclassical unities, a non-anachronistic philosophical vocabulary of whole and parts or of the general and particular in the criticism of poetry, which involution provides a “rule” more consonant with the laws of the imagination rather than with the rhetorical and absolutist dicta that were thither available in the literary canon.

Territoriality and Migration in a Divided Society: Lay Theories of Citizenship and Place in Northern Ireland

The study of citizenship has increasingly focused on the ways in which spatialized understandings of the concept can be used to marginalise and exclude social groups: exclusive constructions of national boundaries, local neighbourhoods and public spaces can deny marginalised groups their social and political rights. Less attention has been paid to how constructions of place can accommodate different groups’ rights and promote peaceful coexistence. This is particularly important in locations where migration disrupts existing understandings (‘lay theories’) of the relationship between residency, identity and collective rights. The present research examines how spatialized understandings of citizenship shape perceptions of intergroup mixing in previously segregated areas of a post-conflict society. Critical Discursive Social Psychological (CDSP) analysis of 30 interviews with long-term residents and recent migrants to increasingly mixed areas of Belfast shows that, while all pa
rticipants acknowledged Northern Ireland’s territorialisation, different lay theories of citizenship underpin the possibility and desirability of intergroup coexistence. Long-term residents drew upon understandings of the negative citizenry of the outgroup to argue against the possibility of peaceful coexistence within their locale, while recent incomers gave evidence of their own experiences of good citizenship within the shared spaces of neighbourhood to demonstrate that this could and should be achieved. The implications of lay theories of citizenship for the study of residential migration and mixing are discussed

Sobre el valor de la verdad: una crítica a Richard Rorty

En el presente texto se sostiene, con Rorty, que la verdad no es una propiedad de hechos –ni mucho menos de objetos–. Sin embargo, contra Rorty, se afirma que asumir esta posición no implica la eliminación del concepto de verdad de nuestros discursos teóricos y filosóficos, esto es, que sigue teniendo sentido hacer una reflexión filosófica sobre la verdad. La estrategia para mostrar esto es abiertamente pragmatista: se inicia con el análisis de las prácticas de los hablantes para mostrar que no adquirimos los mismos compromisos cuando atribuimos verdad y cuando atribuimos justificación (sección 1); posteriormente, se evidencia en qué sentido la distinción filosófica entre verdad y justificación es útil socialmente (sección 2); y para finalizar, se muestra que dicha distinción no entraña ninguna metafísica misteriosa (sección 3).

Quase-verdade e pragmatismo

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Sets and Supersets

Peer reviewed

Sets and Supersets

Peer reviewed

Surveying theories and philosophies of mathematics education

Any theory of thinking or teaching or learning rests on an underlying philosophy of knowledge. Mathematics education is situated at the nexus of two fields of inquiry, namely mathematics and education. However, numerous other disciplines interact with these two fields which compound the complexity of developing theories that define mathematics education. We first address the issue of clarifying a philosophy of mathematics education before attempting to answer whether theories of mathematics education are constructible? In doing so we draw on the foundational writings of Lincoln and Guba (1994), in which they clearly posit that any discipline within education, in our case mathematics education, needs to clarify for itself the following questions: (1) What is reality? Or what is the nature of the world around us? (2) How do we go about knowing the world around us? [the methodological question, which presents possibilities to various disciplines to develop methodological paradigms] and, (3) How can we be certain in the “truth” of what we know? [the epistemological question]

Truth, Proof and Gödelian Arguments : A Defence of Tarskian Truth in Mathematics

One of the most fundamental questions in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the relation between truth and formal proof. The position according to which the two concepts are the same is called deflationism, and the opposing viewpoint substantialism. In an important result of mathematical logic, Kurt Gödel proved in his first incompleteness theorem that all consistent formal systems containing arithmetic include sentences that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system. However, such undecidable Gödel sentences can be established to be true once we expand the formal system with Alfred Tarski s semantical theory of truth, as shown by Stewart Shapiro and Jeffrey Ketland in their semantical arguments for the substantiality of truth. According to them, in Gödel sentences we have an explicit case of true but unprovable sentences, and hence deflationism is refuted. Against that, Neil Tennant has shown that instead of Tarskian truth we can expand the formal system with a soundness principle, according to which all provable sentences are assertable, and the assertability of Gödel sentences follows. This way, the relevant question is not whether we can establish the truth of Gödel sentences, but whether Tarskian truth is a more plausible expansion than a soundness principle. In this work I will argue that this problem is best approached once we think of mathematics as the full human phenomenon, and not just consisting of formal systems. When pre-formal mathematical thinking is included in our account, we see that Tarskian truth is in fact not an expansion at all. I claim that what proof is to formal mathematics, truth is to pre-formal thinking, and the Tarskian account of semantical truth mirrors this relation accurately. However, the introduction of pre-formal mathematics is vulnerable to the deflationist counterargument that while existing in practice, pre-formal thinking could still be philosophically superfluous if it does not refer to anything objective. Against this, I argue that all truly deflationist philosophical theories lead to arbitrariness of mathematics. In all other philosophical accounts of mathematics there is room for a reference of the pre-formal mathematics, and the expansion of Tarkian truth can be made naturally. Hence, if we reject the arbitrariness of mathematics, I argue in this work, we must accept the substantiality of truth. Related subjects such as neo-Fregeanism will also be covered, and shown not to change the need for Tarskian truth. The only remaining route for the deflationist is to change the underlying logic so that our formal languages can include their own truth predicates, which Tarski showed to be impossible for classical first-order languages. With such logics we would have no need to expand the formal systems, and the above argument would fail. From the alternative approaches, in this work I focus mostly on the Independence Friendly (IF) logic of Jaakko Hintikka and Gabriel Sandu. Hintikka has claimed that an IF language can include its own adequate truth predicate. I argue that while this is indeed the case, we cannot recognize the truth predicate as such within the same IF language, and the need for Tarskian truth remains. In addition to IF logic, also second-order logic and Saul Kripke s approach using Kleenean logic will be shown to fail in a similar fashion.